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What Kind of Data Center Can You Build With $500M?
coondoggie writes "So, if the government gave your company $500 million to spend on building a new data center what would you buy and how would you build it? Well, the Social Security Administration is about to find out. As part of the stimulus bill, or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the SSA got the tidy little sum to replace its National Computer Center. The SSA in fact says it will need closer to $800 million to fund a new IT infrastructure, including the new data center — the physical building, power and cooling infrastructure, IT hardware, and systems applications. (This is addition to a $72 million backup facility currently under construction in Durham, North Carolina)."
...when you could have two for twice as much?
OK, actually two 250 million dollar datacenters, but I love that quote from Contact.
Why tie up that much money in one site when you could build two world class structures and have full redundancy?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
As someone who maintains (part of) that 36 million lines of COBOL code, it's not as spaghetti as you might think. Many parts of it are quite clean, they just haven't been touched in years but they're simple and they work. The problem is, we're facing a demographic time bomb. The folks who wrote the system got hired in a huge spree in the 60s and 70s, and are reaching retirement age with full government pensions. Lots of them retire and come back as contractors, but we're still losing a lot of them.
Find an industry that would otherwise need a gas fired boiler and on-sell the heat.
Other options:
- Heated public swimming pool
- Source of community/public heating
Look at the locations where Google is putting it's new data centers. They are in rural parts of the Carolinas on property adjacent to power plants. Google negotiates uninterruptable power contracts in fast growing states on cheap land.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Commodity hardware
Full virtualization at the OS level
And a second, mirrored data center on the other side of the country
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
There are plenty of not-out-of business companies still running COBOL for good reason. Admittedly, many of them are banks who are now going out of business, but not because of their COBOL. Look how much money IBM's mainframe division is still quietly making: many of these are COBOL engines.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
NO! They already teach us enough superfluous crap to make me wish I was a business major.
What colleges need to do is stop teaching history lessons and begin teaching students how to learn on their own. Face it, your job will not mimic what you learned in college no matter how good the school was, or how good of a student you were. Real life != school life.
Don't give a man a fish. Don't teach a man to fish. Teach a man to learn how to fish.
Classic COBOL is something of a special case:
No real user types. There were things you could do to fake this but its hard to maintain.
Very limited procedure capability. There is a perform A through B capability (so the extent of the routine is defined at the call site! - but there is a way to avoid that using SECTIONs or internal labels) but there is no way to pass parameters - other than as global data. You can also write a subroutine as a separate compilation unit.
Modifiable (at run time) GOTO statements. Nobody in their right mind would allow this in new code even back in the late seventies (well, I wouldn't at least) but there was a lot of legacy code written by people not in their right mind. If I remember correctly PERFORMing a bunch of code would mess with the last paragraph so that if you subsequently fell through that code it would not in fact fall through. Doing this is, of course, evil, but see remarks above.
A large number of subsets. The language allowed you to subset. For example, one really nice feature was the report writer that would allow you to bang out a report program in a couple of hours, but lots of processors did not implement it. I actually had my own report program generator to avoid this problem.
What all this means is while its not that much easier to write bad programs in COBOL than in other languages, if you work at it, you can really make life difficult for someone coming to clean up your mess later.
Squirrel!