Slashdot Mirror
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 will start with the assumption that this data center must be non-homogeneous. Get an assessment of all the projects that are using the current system you're going to replace (you know, the one with 36 million lines of COBOL code?). Because the number one priority of the customer (other projects) is going to be the lengthy transition from that to current technology. Prepare yourselves for this: Some of the projects aren't going to have any funding to do jackshit. Which means that the awesome spaghetti coded current system that's held together with COBOL duct tape needs to remain intact in some form. Not ideal situation but an uncomfortable truth. I'm thinking you would want to set aside 10% or $50 million or so for this (just throwing out a figure).
My work here is dung.
Could you approach Google and ask them to license their ideas on server and data 'pod' technology for your sharded databases? I'm not saying build the whole thing like this but with $500 million, you could probably have a large section to search and sharded databases that mimics Google. I don't think there's anything wrong with following the leader in that department. This probably isn't the best solution for relational databases so I would think another architecture would be in place for your MySQL and Postgres traditional database layouts. And that would be just huge centralized servers running virtualized instances of Linux with MySQL or Postgres.
My work here is dung.
...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!
Putting the operation in a location that is cost effective would make the taxpayers very happy. The DC area is too expensive. Maybe an old missile facility in Wyoming or the Dakotas.
Then spend the rest on hookers and blow.
Hey, the gov't does that all the time, why are you staring at me like that??
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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
Data Center: $10M*
Hookers and Beer: $490M
*I reckon I could get that down to $6M by cutting corners though, so that's another $4M for the beer :)
Summation 2
200m for me, 200m for you, 100m for the guy in India who builds a data center.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...but I'll bet you $500 million that: 1) It won't be nearly enough money; 2) It will be obsolete before it is finished; 3) It won't be finished before Social Security runs completely out of money (which will coincide nicely with my scheduled retirement); 4) [Fill in the blank]
Congress has already bankrupted the SSA fund, so all they need is one computeer that can add and subtract "0" very quickly....unless they need something that can divide by zero :)