Feds Discover 1,000 More Government Data Centers

1sockchuck writes "The US government has 2,094 data centers, nearly 1,000 more than previous estimates, according to an updated inventory by federal agencies. The finding underscores the scope of the challenge facing the Obama administration as it seeks to streamline the government's IT infrastructure in a massive data center consolidation."

Comments

Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[elrous0]

Any Presidential administration that comes into the federal government promising to combat bureaucracy and duplication is either lying (most likely) or is truly epically deluded. No agency in the federal government is going to let some johnny-come-lately President who's going to be gone in 4-8 years come in and fundamentally change the way they've worked for 60 years or more. Oh sure, they'll TELL him they'll do it. They kiss the ass of their new director (aka his political toadie appointee, also to be gone in 4-8 years). But the most they'll *actually* do is stall, make token gestures, lie, and basically find other ways to run out the clock until the next administration comes in (with a whole new set bullshit streamlining promises). There are long-term professionals in these agencies who've been playing out that scenario since the Carter administration (maybe even some old Nixon/Ford guys).

Bill Clinton said it best (and I'm paraphrasing here) "The most shocking thing I discovered about the Presidency is that people don't do what you say."

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[jonescb]

Bill Clinton said it best (and I'm paraphrasing here) "The most shocking thing I discovered about the Presidency is that people don't do what you say."

Isn't that how it's supposed to work? If everybody had to do as he said, we'd call the position Dictator instead of President. The president has very limited power, which is a good thing.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[Pojut]

In the case of Obama, I think he truly believed that he would be able to change things once he was in a position of "real" power. Except when he got elected, he found out that the president isn't a position of "real" power after all...you're hands are tied when it comes to MANY things.

I don't think his promises have been broken, so much as had reality injected in them.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[elrous0]

Yes, but most people assume the President has a lot more power than they actually do. You come in as President, you appoint a new director of agency X, you tell him to do such-and-such at that agency, he says okay, and then he goes off and doesn't do it. Your own cabinet will often lie to you, deceive you, outright ignore you, stall you, etc. And everyone is just waiting around for the day when you'll be gone (which they know will be, at most, 8 years from now). Any given federal employee is way more worried about covering their ass and sticking around for the long-term than with any directive you might issue. No one gives a shit about your campaign promises or legacy except you and maybe a few members of your cabinet. It's like being the captain of a boat on the very of mutiny--for 4-8 years.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[gumbi west]

The President can do a lot, he just has to sick someone else on the topic like a bull dog. He also has to be really picky about his battles.

I can think of many examples from situations I know of.

Exmaples:

• under Bush, the administration did manage to decrease the number of payroll offices substantially and keep (mainly) the the good ones, and decreased the travel authorization/reimbursement IT systems to the less crappy ones (btw private industry guys, is there such a thing as a good travel authorization/reimbursement system?).
• Clinton decreased the number of senior executives (people making about $140,000 in DC) substantially while increasing the number of minority senior executives.
• Clinton, with Gore's help, increased the number of contractors in the civilian services. He did this not by forcing contracting on the government agencies, but by making a process and forcing them to look at some of their employees every year.
• Bush, with Rumsfeld's help, increased the number of contractors in the military. Not sure how this worked, it might have all been from the top.

You have to realize, the US government is too large to control from DC. It works best when there is central minimum requirements that vary with the task at hand and how you meet them is left up to some local manager.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[PPH]

Yes. But onne would expect that the career bureaucrats would take some pride in doing the best job that they can. The whole "We've been doing it this way for decades and when you're gone in 4 years, we'll still will be" is pure bullshit. We need some way to motivate them to pursue continuous process improvement. Then, the proper function of the administration is to watch over the operations and make policy decisions. Not nit-pick the data center architecture. On the other hand, when the administration calls the IT folks in to report on why they have 2000 data centers, they should be able to justify their design decision. Or have an ongoing program in place to bring the system into line with that design. Then, all the administration has to do is bless the plan and let them carry on.

Political appointees can't expect to micro-manage their departments. They need to delegate that to the long timers. What they need to do is to keep the fire lit under them. And if the carrot of pride in a job well done isn't motivation enough, then the stick of outsourcing it all to private industry and tossing the whole bunch out on their ass needs to be a valid option.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[tnk1]

And, to be honest, its one reason I didn't vote for him. As soon as I understood that he had no idea how the government actually works, I knew the only thing that was going to happen was that he was going to simply add to the government. Not because he's some sort of big government liberal, but because adding to the government is all that the bureaucracy lets you do without specialized knowledge of how the bureaucracy works.

The Tea Party people really have no chance either. Their only value in my mind is that they will gridlock the addition of more crap to the government. I have more sympathy with their aims, but I know full well that outsiders have no chance at meaningful change unless it is accomplished via tearing down the whole edifice.

The real challenge is not throwing the bums out or creating "Change", its finding knowledgeable insiders who know how to get things done in the bureaucracy. People who can ease out the holdouts from their fiefdoms, who can soothe the Civil Service unions, and who can gain the trust of multiple administrations so that they have the ability to actually do something worth doing. I almost think that as soon as the President wins an election, he or she needs to go and campaign at every federal office building and get those people on his side.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[elrous0]

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[BobMcD]

So fire them. Hire someone that will do as you say. CEO's do it in the real world every single day. And if there are laws in your way, get those changed first. Failing that, line-item-veto any spending for their salaries and wait for them to quit. Failing even that, use your executive ability to set their schedules to nil, or require them to report to Alaska, etc.

It really isn't that hard.

People made this same argument towards Ron Paul's campaign promises, and they failed to see the same simplicity of it. There are literally THRONGS of people waiting to get that paycheck the cushy government jobs offer. Use some turnover to get the desired result, but failing that use the powers of scheduling and compensation to achieve the same result. You know, those "executive" powers?

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[elrous0]

Most of the professional level federal employees are protected by laws and union contracts (only the director is an at-will employee that the President can hand his walking papers whenever he feels like it). That means you would have to go through Congress, and maybe even the courts, for the changes needed to just start firing people (or zeroing out their budgets). And good luck with that.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[BobMcD]

I should have saved my earlier post for you, because perhaps you'll be able to explain it to me...

Let's take a concrete example or three. I'll propose some executive solutions to the problems, and you tell me why it won't work:

1) End the wars. President uses Commander-in-Chief authority to redeploy every single unit, or just the desired units, to the United States, effective immediately. Anyone not obeying the order will be brought up for court martial. Failing that, simply veto any spending bills until they run out of money.

2) End "Department of X". Dismiss and/or reassign every appointee, refuse to nominate any new candidates. Failing that, set their home office in ANWAR and refuse to reimburse any mileage, due to the economy, of course.

3) Eliminate the Deficit. Veto, veto, veto. Line-item-veto, even. Signing statements stating that funding starts out at zero dollars this year and increases to the figures on the bill one year after the bill is no longer valid, or one year after the Union no longer exists, which ever comes last. Failing that, refuse to even read any more bills until you get what you want on your desk.

Who would have the power to stop any of this? The next President, maybe, but that's about it. There's nothing in the Constitution that says the commander has to do any of these things, and no one has the power to force any of it to happen either. So long as the President made his intentions entirely clear to the people, and as long as they supported his behavior, I imagine that no one would have the political will to oppose it either.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[BobMcD]

Or you just pay out the contract...

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[elrous0]

Reagan was only able to do that because the air traffic controllers actually broke a federal law by striking. When they refused his order to return to work, they foolishly made themselves fair game for immediate firing, bypassing all normal federal employee protections.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[timeOday]

The main reason most of those things cannot be done is because voters don't want them to be done.

Voters do not want a sudden, humiliating withdrawl from Afghanistan that would be an admission of defeat. (Others would argue saving face isn't worth sacrificing lives, but I digress...)

Voters do not want to balance the budget. What they want is to pay no taxes when young, and receive full benefits when old. And who they vote for is whoever promises to do that.

It's just human nature. Almost every person thinks THEY are the one doing more than their fair share, and what they want is for everybody else to start bucking up and being more like them. Just like a big marriage among 300,000,000 people.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[Rich0]

Uh, pride in a job well done won't get them anywhere. Trust me - pride in quality is no better in the federal government than in any major corporation. In the company I work for we'd still have data centers in every closet in every building and armies of shadow IT if business leaders didn't know that they'd be shown the door if they didn't comply with corporate directives.

Who wants to depend on some external server group to maintain their servers, when instead they could just have their own group doing the work for a mere $500k/yr or whatever. It isn't like the money comes out of their paycheck - in fact, the larger their budget, the more money they have for bonuses, and the higher their own position to justify the spending allowance.

In corporations this is tempered by the fact that if the company doesn't turn a profit then the investors will clean house. Plus, the salaries of the middle managers interfere with the ability of the senior executives to pay themselves bonuses, since the company can't just go to Congress and ask for more money. If a company wants money they have to earn it - no matter how important it is that they get it.

I don't think that people working in industry are any more or less virtuous than those working in government. However, government offers a different set of perverse incentives. Those tend to lead to massive bureaucracy and organizations that seemingly exist only to serve themselves.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[iluvcapra]

End the wars. President uses Commander-in-Chief authority to redeploy every single unit, or just the desired units, to the United States, effective immediately. Anyone not obeying the order will be brought up for court martial. Failing that, simply veto any spending bills until they run out of money

As we've seen with Obama's attempt to reduce commitments in Afghanistan, against the will of the generals, it's practically impossible for a president to reduce troop deployments without the support of the generals, particularly as long as the party in opposition supports an open-ended commitment. The generals simply leak the content of their meetings to the war party, and leak negative stories about the policy decisions to the press, and work to eliminate and marginalize people who offer solutions that reduce commitments beneath what the generals think "will accomplish the mission." It would be easy for Obama to end the war at the cost of his presidency, of course, but why bother when your replacement will be an ultra-hawk Republican who will simply re-escalate? That's really the issue, there's a lot of competition for people to prove themselves the most belligerent, because there really isn't much of a consensus for ending the war among conservatives or liberals.

2) End "Department of X". Dismiss and/or reassign every appointee, refuse to nominate any new candidates. Failing that, set their home office in ANWAR and refuse to reimburse any mileage, due to the economy, of course.

All cabinet-level departments are created by acts of congress; a president cannot abrogate an act of congress. A failure to appoint a head will cause the civil-service interim appointee to run the department. Congress will attempt the fund the department through omnibus legislation.

3) Eliminate the Deficit. Veto, veto, veto. Line-item-veto, even. Signing statements stating that funding starts out at zero dollars this year and increases to the figures on the bill one year after the bill is no longer valid, or one year after the Union no longer exists, which ever comes last. Failing that, refuse to even read any more bills until you get what you want on your desk.

The President of the US has no line-item veto, because it's unconstitutional. The president has no right to dictate how the US spends its money, this is the responsibility of the House of Representatives. There is no evidence that people really want to eliminate the deficit. The deficit is a fundamentally popular institution and people would never vote someone out of office for increasing it. And deficit reformers, instead of actually trying to win the argument on the merits and win elections, propose ever more dictatorial powers for their great white hope, that one man who will, Cincinnatus-like, ride to the rescue of America, use untrammeled king-like authority to set the nation straight, and then disappear. The requirement that a president either affirm or veto bills in full is a fundamental check on executive power.

You call for dictatorship, if only to deal with the immediate crisis, but that's how it always starts... Congress is the institution in our system that prevents dictatorship. If you take powers away from congress and hand them to the president, you break the system.

The problem is that people don't actually vote for senators and representatives they respect any more, people who can -- they just vote for the person who has the highest propensity for giving them what they ask for.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[michael_cain]

Well, in most agencies there are a number of appointive posts at the top, not just the very head. Eg, various assistant secretaries and under secretaries are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and serve at the pleasure of the President. Then there is the hybrid case of appointive positions that have fixed terms (eg, the members of the FCC).

It's also worth pointing out that the federal civil service, which many regard as a serious problem because it makes it hard to fire people without cause, was imposed as the solution to a worse problem: wholesale firings of the professional staff whenever the Administration changed hands, and replacement with people who might have zero experience but had the right "political" qualifications.

How far down to push appointive positions is a hard question. Should the head of FEMA, within the Dept of Homeland Security, be an appointee or a civil service professional? FEMA used to be considered a joke, poorly run and incapable of executing. Bill Clinton appointed a head who had extensive experience in emergency management at the state level, and who is generally regarded as having turned the agency around. George Bush appointed someone with no prior experience in the field, and the agency quickly returned to joke status.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[gnieboer]

OK, I'll give you some straight answers as to why that's not going to happen, even if you were president tomorrow:

1- End the Wars. Actually, the wars are ending. But let's say tomorrow is your first day in office. Your order is "Redeploy all the units". The CJCS says "Yes, sir". First they need some time to come up with a plan on how to do what you want. So MINIMUM 60 days. Ever tried to get a family of five in the car for a 5-day road trip?? How many hours did that take? OK, now multiply that by 50,000. Moving a force the size of what we have is not a small feat when it's in a land-locked country halfway around the world and we can't just drive down to the coast and hop on a boat. So to make sure it's done right and we don't give $20B worth of stuff to the Taliban when we leave, a plan is a good thing.
So then they come back with the plan, and say it will be 18 months. You lose your mind and say you want it done NOW (you are the President after all!). The CJCS brings in his Intel guys, who give you an hour long brief on the complexities and fragilities of the Afghan society, and how just leaving out of the blue will destroy all the progress made thus far, result in thousands of Afghan deaths due to the resulting civil war, create a resurgence of the Taliban, etc.. Most presidents at this point realize that these are ACTUAL lives that hang on their personal decision (think the picture of Kennedy in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis). No longer an armchair exercise, they realize that there has to be a logical framework for the withdrawal. But like Iraq, it happens, because you are the boss. Just on a timeline tempered with reality and experience. Common Sense Ending...

But for arguments sake, let's say you are fanatical about this (you are the President after all!). You give direct that every available mode of logistics will be used immediately to remove US troops from Afghanistan. OK fine they say, and leave. The CJCS hands in his resignation, as his advice is no longer useful to you. Political mayhem ensues, stuff gets leaked to Congress/the Press, and you spend so much of your time dealing with that you can't keep track of the withdrawal.
You threaten to fire all not obeying your orders, those below you come with briefings showing how they are making progress as best they can, you don't have a clue how logistics works, so you don't know if they are lying or not. So you fire a couple just for good measure... briefings get more and more 'controlled'. Troops end up taking about 24 months to withdraw because of all the mess you made.
So let's say you veto the spending bill. Great idea! Resources are what drives DC. So now there is no funding for the war effort. Pentagon comes to a grinding halt. Problem is that there are still troops in the field (remember land-locked Afghanistan?), who are now dying because of lack of ammunition that you refused to buy them. Pictures of dead GI's come back home. Oh wait, now suddenly your veto gets overridden by Congress.
But you aren't done yet, you use yet more executive power to stop spending any DoD funds. More GI's die. Congress has now had enough, so has the American people, and you are the first to be Impeached/Convicted. And the Brits aren't fond of you either (remember it's a Coalition over there)

(The next 2 are easier)

2- End of Department "X". Which one? Defense? Education? State? Health and Human Services? Yep, you can slay an entire department as President. Problem is that in most areas of government, there is SOME good being done. So it's pretty unlikely you can just kill the whole thing without crippling a vital service people need. OK, no problem... we'll just carve out the fat, right? Trouble is that it's very hard to estimate how many people any department really needs if you aren't in that department (just how many people does it take to keep track of Social Security Numbers, I don't have a clue) And almost no one is coming to come brief you that they need fewer people (a

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[orgelspieler]

Line item veto? The president doesn't have that authority. Clinton had it for a little while, but Rudy Giuliani took it all the way to the Supreme Court to have it declared unconstitutional.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[sjbe]

A) New people are more likely to do as they're told.

Ha! Have you ever actually managed anyone? I have and what you just said is complete nonsense.

There's zero reason the Federal government needs to employ millions of people

Perhaps but the fact is that they do employ that many people and that isn't likely to change.

Congress has no Constitutional authority over how the executive branch is structured. E.g. 'czars'.

Congress has immense formal and informal power over how the executive branch is structured and how it operates. From the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause: "...make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof." Congress has considerable power of oversight over the executive branch. Furthermore, Congress can pass laws to override executive branch decisions, expand or reduce the jurisdiction and regulatory authority of federal agencies, restrict or expand funding, and more.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[operagost]

What President Obama failed to appreciate is all the numb nuts out there that are voting specifically for the candidate that's going to cause the most damage to the federal government.

What the president failed to appreciate is the Constitution.

Never mind that the original tea party had precisely zip to do with taxation, and everything to do with ditching the competitors product so that they wouldn't have any competition.

Both factions were prominent: those who opposed taxation without representation, and merchants who resented the crown's favoritism of the East India tea company.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[jeff4747]

So if none of those employees show up for work, someone goes to jail?

Assuming they're still paid, yes. It's called fraud.

If everyone just up and quit en masse, the president is required by law to replace them.

Besides, a reasonable number of these departments are created by Presidential fiat, without Congressional oversight at all.

Nope. The only significant post created by executive order is the National Security Advisor and their subordinates. All the "Departments of ____" were created by statute.

I have no doubt that laws allowing these positions to exist have been passed, but I see little in them requiring that they exist.

Yes, clearly recent events like the salmonella outbreak in eggs demonstrate how we don't need an HHS. And your posts don't indicate the desperate need for a much better Department of Education.

However, the conviction would need to be within the bounds of the law

The bounds of the law are literally "any reason". Period. The Supreme Court's interpretation of the language in the Constitution means you can remove the president from office for wearing a blue tie on Thursday.

You have to remember that the founders expected us to remove a president from office every 10-20 years. So they wrote the Constitution to make impeachment and conviction a normal process. After a few generations of no impeachments, many have mistakenly gone to the conclusion that impeachment is reserved only for serious crimes.

and I highly doubt that anything I've advocated would meet the definition of a 'crime' nor a 'misdemeanor'.

Well, so far you've advocated obstruction of justice, fraud, misappropriation of federal funds, and contempt of Congress. And those are the easy ones to rattle off the top of my head. There's probably several more felonies that are a bit tangential but still relevant. And that doesn't even include your unconstitutional line-item veto.

And again, again, I'm proposing that this happen with the support of the electorate

Well, now I've got to Godwin this whole debate and point out Hitler's electorate supported his power grab too.

You don't hand out presidential powers based on presidents you like. Nor on responsible presidents you dislike. You hand out power based on "What if Hitler or Stalin got elected?". Because eventually they will be.

Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings

[budgenator]

"It would be easy for Obama to end the war at the cost of his presidency, "
What presidency, He's treated like a lame-duck president before the mid-term elections of his first term. Actually calling him a lame duck is being generous, He's more like a turtle on a post,
You know he didn't get up there by himself,
he doesn't belong up there,
he doesn't know what to do while he's up there,
he's elevated beyond his ability to function, and you just wonder what kind of dumb asses put him up there to begin with.

Hmmm

[c0mpliant]

Why do I get the image of an Indiana Jones style character pulling back overgrown bushes and thorns to reveal the long Lost Temple of Data Storage...

Possibly being chased by some legacy system throwing strange errors at him while he trying to escape a rolling ball of ethernet cables

Re:Hmmm

[Sponge Bath]

Indy: Ethernet cables. Why'd it have to be ethernet cables?

Big company

[captaindomon]

Eh, if you've worked in a multi-billion dollar F100 company this isn't surprising at all. Any random department can buy a couple of servers and set up their own "data center", and when you have 100,000 employees, it's hard to keep track of. Now imagine you are a multi-trillion dollar company, which is basically what the federal government is, with three million employees. Things get complicated.

Re:Big company

[nedlohs]

Your "couple of servers" probably doesn't meet the criteria for counting in this case:

"""
The process defined a data center as any room larger than 500 square feet dedicated to data processing that meets the one of the four tier classifications defined by The Uptime Institute.
"""

Now you could put a couple of servers in a 500 square feet room, but that seems pretty unlikely.

Re:Big company

[mtmra70]

Your "couple of servers" probably doesn't meet the criteria for counting in this case:

I work at a F100 company and we have two data centers which are larger than 500sq/ft and house at least 100 physical boxes and a couple SANs each, yet the company/IT doesn't count them as part of their normal data center strategy. If you asked global IT if we had data centers at our site, they would say "nope".

Re:Big company

[CastrTroy]

You do realize that 500 sq. feet is just over a 22 foot square room. That's not that big at all. I've often seen small "data centers" of this size in government buildings. Granted, I live in Canada, but I imagine the US is the same. Each little organizational unit wants to manage all their own stuff to increase their importance, and make it look like they are doing something. So they all have their own little data center. It's all to play their little game. If you don't spend your whole budget, then they figure you don't need the money, so the following year they cut it. If you do spend it all, then you can claim that you are underfunded and possibly get your budget raised. There's always a mad rush at the end of the fiscal year to ensure that all the money is spent.

Re:Big company

[guruevi]

Off course, there's always the problem that when you use the centrally managed resources, they're practically worthless. I work in a similar environment and doing everything ourselves is ~10x cheaper and much more flexible. Even outsourcing it to a commercial entity would be cheaper. 1TB of data does not need to cost $10k/year, (paid) e-mail boxes should not be limited to 250MB and you really don't need 8 Exchange admins to manage 8 Exchange servers (maybe you do, I have only worked with Postfix). The downside is off course that you'll need to find a decent sysadmin every time and can't get away with somebody with a 6 month first line support stint.

Re:Big company

[DrgnDancer]

But the government isn't one homogeneous organization. It's hundreds or thousands of agencies, field offices, departments, and units. All of them have purchasing authority. Any of them can have its own network. Some of them are so secret that even their inventory is classified. Some of them may be so secret that their very existence is classified. Many of these systems are so old and legacy that they were purchased before such concepts as "IT" department even exited.

This isn't a building, or even a logical LAN where someone gets an alert when someone else plugs into the port in 32B. It's a 3 *million* person operation with "networks" that range from 4 people in an FBI field office with a file server 4 workstations and an Internet connection, to the Army's network of 100's of thousands of computers, to a black ops network that no one outside the immediate chain of command is supposed to know exists.

Whats a datacenter?

[vlm]

Whats a datacenter?

As a fedgov employee (US Army) in the early 90s I had two big green unisys btos machines each with three terminals running a database Admittedly no outside world connection except 110V AC but the terminal things did have at least a hundred feet of cable. For the purposes of this report, would by old office be defined as a "datacenter"?

Re:Whats a datacenter?

[betterunixthanunix]

I see the same sort of confusion over the term "server room." At my institution, all sorts of weird things are "server rooms" -- everything from a dedicated room with rows of rackmounts, backup power, HVAC, etc. to a closet with a few switches and a NAS in it. How many server rooms do we have? Who knows? I would not be surprised if many of these "data centers" turned out to be nothing more than a single rack in a field office somewhere.

I lost a datacenter

[Dancindan84]

...literally _lost_. The servers respond to ping, work completely. I just can't figure out where in the country it is.

Re:I lost a datacenter

[Securityemo]

I've never been involved in data center-ing, but call whomever owns the last jump to it (and presumably has records of the cables running to it) and ask?

Re:I lost a datacenter

[Dancindan84]

Not sure if you're serious, but my comment was just a reference to http://bash.org/?5273

Re:I lost a datacenter

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you checked behind the dry wall?

what a horrible idea

[Surt]

Why don't we provide a small number of locations, the destruction of any of which would significantly cripple our government. I can't imagine who would find such a consolidation helpful to their goals.

Your taxes at work

[hessian]

In a normal business, you serve a client.

In government, the client is yourself, and you must "justify" that position with lots of public activity.

That activity does not need to be effective, it only needs to look effective. By definition, there's less risk in ineffective activity.

This is why government is often ineffective, and why both left and right wing parties want to streamline it.

Really a good idea

[DoofusOfDeath]

My impression is that in most cases, consolidation can reduce apparent IT costs, but produces a not just centralized computers but a centralized bureaucracy.

And when you have a centralized bureaucracy, the individual agencies will be subject to data centers that act on their "requests" more slowly if at all. (Note that when you lose control over your data center, what used to be an order now becomes a request.)

In general, it seems like centralizing things can help with some issues, but creates a boatload of other issues.

They should've asked the Chinese straight away

[G3ckoG33k]

They should've asked the Chinese straight away. They would have known.

1000 more datacenters?

[Lookin4Trouble]

Yes, OMB changed what they consider a "datacenter" - previous Datacall regarded anywhere that had 5 servers, a switch, and a router as a datacenter. Now they've lowered the bar to (3 Servers) -or- (1 server + 1 switch) -or- (1 switch + 1 router) -or- (1 server + 1 router). Frankly, I'm surprised the number only roughly doubled, I would've thought there were a LOT more sites with a server, switch, router setup...

"What is a datacenter?"

[AMuse]

Before everyone gets all spun up on government waste, inefficiency, etc - I'd like to point out that numbers like these are never accurate. (For the record, I work for the feds, in the IT field).

The problem with "The feds have X datacenters" as a metric is that various audits occur at different times and by different auditors. These auditors almost always have differing definitions for what a datacenter actually is.

In one audit, a group can come through and define "Datacenter" as a big room where servers are co-located and services run on behalf of others. They'll find 2 at my center. Then a year later, a different group comes in and defines "Datacenter" as anywhere that more than 5 computers are running and left on all night. They'll find 200 at my center. Yes, this actually happened! The auditors came through dozens of science labs, found project servers sitting in the labs, and labeled each lab a datacenter.

Now here is the trick to why the statistics are complete mush. A normal IT guy would walk through the lab and say "Hey, that server should be in a datacenter!" -- but the auditors make the reverse conclusion. "Hey, this lab is a datacenter".

Yes, there is waste in the federal sphere and we absolutely need to take action to be more efficient at all levels. However, this article is basically pushing a number that came from someones' imagination, and pretending it's meaningful.

Re:"What is a datacenter?"

[petermgreen]

People don't generally insist on waxing their own floors or doing their own wiring, after all.
Because by and large the central cleaning do a good job and keep out of everyones way.

Often there are poor accounting systems that layer unreasonable costs on putting something in a data center, which obviously is an accounting problem.
Even if false costs and unnessacery beuracracy were eliminated there are a lot of costs to moving a server from a lab to a datacenter, a few that spring to mind.

1: Backed up datacenter power costs more than regular grid power and datacenter space also costs more than space under someones desk that wouldn't be used for anything else if the server was moved.
2: Lack of physical access means that unless you are very confident in your abilities and/or have very easy physical access you need to spend extra to get some form of remote admin. You also need reliable hardware.
3: You probablly need the machine rackmountable
2+3: The above points pretty much imply use of a new machine rather than the repurposed desktop that serves fine in the corner of the lab.

Not datacenters, or server rooms, but "labs"

[whitroth]

There's a real problem with this analysis, esp. when you start defining what I'd call server rooms, things at 500'sq, as datacenters. We've got two large rooms, one probably bordering on that 500 ft, and no, you *cannot* "consolidate" that into a large one, for a number of reasons... like purpose and usage. If you're doing ordinary services, yeah (assuming you can trust them to keep them working, as opposed to the Department-wide login that just went down two days in a row - test boxes? h/a failover fallback? Huh?), but for special purposes - high performance computing, doing research, or some things I'm sure the military uses - there's no way to consolidate. You'd get long lines waiting for time on the systems, when the users are doing something so intensive that on small clusters they take *days* to run.

You just can't lump it all with dumb, large boxes.

              mark

ObDisclaimer: I work for a federal contractor, on site.

If ruling were so simple...

[sjbe]

So fire them. Hire someone that will do as you say.

Not always possible. Lots of federal employees are unionized. Lots more of them don't actually report to the president, even indirectly. Even those that do are much harder to hire/fire than you suppose and most really important jobs actually require Congressional approval. We limit the President's power for very good reasons and while this has some undesirable side effects, I'm not about to vote to give anyone unlimited power over staffing in the federal government.

CEO's do it in the real world every single day.

The president isn't a CEO and the two jobs bear little resemblance to one another. Seriously, the two jobs are nothing alike.

And if there are laws in your way, get those changed first.

Only Congress can change laws. The president can influence, suggest, cajole and threaten but it's up to Congress to actually change the laws.

Failing that, line-item-veto any spending for their salaries and wait for them to quit.

The President of the US does not have a line item veto. President Clinton briefly held that power but it was declared unconstitutional in 1998 for violating the Presentment Clause.

Failing even that, use your executive ability to set their schedules to nil, or require them to report to Alaska, etc.

Again, lots of people don't report to the president and his ability to hire/fire is far more limited than you seem to suppose. Even if he fires someone, many jobs require approval from Congress to fill and that is not something any president wants to try to get more than necessary. Sometimes the president does direct those who report to him to de-fund programs and use his executive authority to circumvent the law and the federal bureaucracy but the president is just one man and has some (thank $diety) severe limits on his power and is badly outnumbered.

It really isn't that hard.

Bullshit. If it was easy it would have already been done. People in power will use any powers they have. If it were so easy to fire people and otherwise shape the federal bureaucracy it would be done.

People made this same argument towards Ron Paul's campaign promises, and they failed to see the same simplicity of it.

No they didn't. The world is a more complex place than Ron Paul makes it out to be and most people dismissed his rhetoric as populist nonsense. Perhaps he appeals to you but most people think of him as a fringe weirdo, myself included.