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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)."
I concur. There are 3 empty data centers along the I-81 corridor (within 2-3 hours of DC) that stand empty, reminders of the dot com bust. Why build new when you can retrofit an existing center.
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.