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US House Decommissions Its Last Mainframe
coondoggie writes "The US House of Representatives has taken its last mainframe offline, signaling the end of an era in Washington, DC computing. The last mainframe supposedly enjoyed 'quasi-celebrity status' within the House data center, having spent 12 years keeping the House's inventory control records and financial management data, among other tasks. But it was time for a change, with the House spending $30,000 a year to power the mainframe and another $700,000 each year for maintenance and support."
But here's a more profound question: why is the House of Representatives running its own, separate data centers (primary and disaster)? Couldn't they at least consolidate with, oh I don't know, the Senate?!?!
I'm pretty sure there's something in the constitution about separation of data centres...
I don't care what part of the political spectrum you fall under, that's change we can all get behind.
Congratulations! You may pick up your IT Peace Prize at the door!
Unless your job was supporting old, proprietary big iron.
Um, on second thought, never mind.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Either that, or the IBM salespeople forgot to tell the politicians that a mainframe is too big to fail!
The punch cards. Especially filling in the holes so they can be reused.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Government 0.9.8
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At least they're getting some money back by selling the disks on ebay :)
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Decommission the representatives. Then put the mainframe in charge. I'm sure it is much more efficient at processing bribes, though it probably lacks sex scandal capabilities.
The worst thing is, going from $700k a year to $350k a year doesn't just halve your uptime, it takes it from 99.999% to 99.99%. Or from 52 minutes to eight hours and 45 minutes. The first time they can't access their records for an entire work day, maybe they'll realize what they were paying for before.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.