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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.
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
...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]
Because they're not in my Congressional district?
I think more colleges as part of their Computer Science Elective they should be a class on Legacy System Maintenance. Legacy systems are not as bad as everyone makes them out to be. As well for the most part languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN are really not that hard to follow and learn. In many ways they are easier then the newer languages, as they are designed to do particular things and do them well, and not like C,C++,Java,.NET try to be the end all be all language. The old code is usually focused on the business logic while newer code seems to be working more with trying to get the formatting correct, and being well organized and modularized (which is a good thing too). But the old code you get PROCESS_CLAIM.CBL all the code that you need to process the claims are there, so when you fix the code there the problem is fixed. Having done a lot of work in FORTRAN myself I have found that there isn't that much spaghetti going on. Yes there is the GOTO statement but it is usually limited to ERROR cases where if something critical failes it GOTO ErrorNum and displays the error and quits the app.
For these legacy apps normally when something needs to be changed is because there was a change in the business process not because of a bug.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.