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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