This is an overview of a session that will be presented at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2012. Click here to register.

Over the past decade, U.S. taxpayers have sunk billions of dollars into the operation of thousands of underutilized government data centers. In fact, according to former federal CIO Vivek Kundra, before the announcement of a huge federal data center consolidation initiative, the U.S. government’s IT infrastructure had an average utilization of only 27%.

Now, take a look inside the biggest data center consolidation project in the world. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget has committed to closing 1,200 federal data centers by 2015 in an effort to combat data center waste and siloed bureaucracy on a massive scale. Over the course of the consolidation initiative, government agencies hope to make better use of tax dollars by halting redundant federal IT spending and excess energy consumption, improving cyber security and taking advantage of hot technologies like virtualization and cloud computing.

So far, the consolidation project has exceeded initial goals. In one success story, the Census Bureau has managed to close a 6,570-square-foot contractor-operated data center, which will save the agency $1.7 million annually. The Census Bureau has reduced its total data center power consumption by 10 percent and is even offering hosting and colocation services to other agencies.

The federal data center consolidation initiative has saved $14 million to date, but that’s only .0183% of the U.S. government IT budget, and the project is far from over. Find out what the situation is like on the ground for the agencies tasked with the heavy lifting from a panel of federal IT executives, hosted by MeriTalk. Karen Petraska of NASA will provide an overview of her agency’s data center strategy; the Department of Energy’s Jake Wooley will discuss efforts to achieve energy savings and lower PUE; and Anil Karmel of the National Nuclear Security Administration will offer insight on the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Infrastructure on Demand private cloud.