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Obama Administration Closing Recently Opened Datacenters
An anonymous reader writes "After quadrupling the number of government datacenters over his first three years, Obama's Administration is reversing course and closing the most recently opened datacenters. With one datacenter reportedly the size of three football fields, my question is what happens to all those recently purchased servers? Will the government hold a server fire sale? Count me in!"
The wording of this post makes it seem as though the data centers were initiated via policies of the Obama administration. However, the reality is that the data center expansion occurred during the policy of the previous Bush administration with funding requested in 2006, approved in 2007 and implementation initiated in 2008 a full year before the Obama administration took office. The Obama administration approved the continuation of the policy in 2009 and 2010 and are currently altering the data center strategy.
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After all of the equipment is sold for scrap at pennies on the dollar, they'll build the datacenters again. That's called stimulus in action.
Yepp, his fault that something that was approved, budgeted and begun before his administration was done... (this is my glare face)
He approved the continuation based on being told that these centers were necessary for data retention and they aren't. So they are getting closed. As any good business person would do when faced with budget restrictions.
This is probably related to the "Cloud First" strategy adopted by the outgoing CIO Vivek Kundra. http://fcw.com/articles/2011/02/28/buzz-cloud-computing-and-budget.aspx
This space for rent.
Cue yelling from Congresspeople whose datacentres are getting chopped.
"Sack someone else! Cut somewhere else!"
Since none of the them DoD they will not be sold through DRMO, most other agencies go through the GSA
FTA:
Over the last two years, the number of U.S. data centers has quadrupled, and yet they are running at only about 27 percent utilization, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The maintenance costs of these data centers, including backup power supplies, air conditioning, fire-suppression and special security devices, has been astronomical, causing them to consume 200 times more power than the typical office space. By more fully utilizing the remaining data centers, the White House hopes to maintain current service levels while drastically cutting costs.
So far the Administration has shut down 81 of these data centers already this year, and has a goal of shutting down another 195 during 2011, and 97 more by the end of 2012 for a total of 373. Beyond 2012, its overall goal will be to shut down 800 data centers by the end of 2015, which it claims will save taxpayers over $3 billion annually.
It makes sense to me that if you're running at 27%, some consolidation should take place. It also makes sense that this would save money going forward. I don't even care if it was Bush that ordered them, we should save the money now.
Fire! Ready? Aim.
FTFY
The Government is off its meds.
Only that could account for the schizoid policy decisions.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Actually, the article specifically says that servers quadrupled in the past two years under a policy approved by Obama (although it was started by Bush). So it was Obama who bought those servers. But, what the heck, you don't need to think when you know it's all Bush's fault!
Due to national security, servers will be divided into those that hosted classified materials, and those that did not. Those that contained classified materials will be labeled as Securely Ensure Nonrecoverable Destruction To Ostensibly Completely Hinder Internationally Notorious Agents, but that's a bit long, so really they will be labeled with the acronym SENDTOCHINA. They will be melted down locally and then sold for scrap. Those that do not contain classified materials will be sold to China to help ease their demand for computing resources that they already build. These will be labeled Mutually Economic Lateral Trade. That too is a bit long, so the systems that should be sold to China will be labeled MELT.
You have heard of the Republican party - right?
There's a reason they're off the meds - its cos the republicans have cut medicare
Strange, I thought GWB was the president who signed Medicare Part D into law. ;-)
There is a bit of a mandate at the moment to reduce government debt/growth. There's far too much dysfunctional, ideological infighting to do this effectively or efficiently.
Since we apparently can't reduce ANY spending to the military (a few less $1B planes?) or on a variety of wars
Talk to Leon Panetta about that one.
Obama saving us money? Your kidding right? I have faith he is just getting rid of them so he can rent them off of someone else at a higher price. Or maybe he got in with Amazon to scale up as need with cloud services kind of like what United Kingdom is up to http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/07/21/uk-government-now-using-huddles-platform-for-top-secret-documents/. Or the fact that Hillary Clinton is shipping US datacenter jobs off to Inda so we don't need a lot of computing power over here. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/india-and-us-to-work-together-on-datagov-and-against-cyber-crime/633 So we will never know.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Also strange-- it's mostly Dems who voted for the health care bill last year that CUT MEDICARE.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Wrong. $350 billion was just cut in the BCA, with about 600 billion more if other cuts are not agreed on by the deadline. Far too little, of course, but a start. An average of $35 billion a year is, indeed, 35 of your planes.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Not really. If you're going to blame anybody for wasting money, it really ought to be the GOP. They're the ones that insisted that giving money to the rich in the form of tax cuts would result in increased tax receipts. Not to mention the fact that they were the ones that engaged in 2 off the books wars and numerous other accounting fixes to make it appear that they weren't overspending by as much as they were.
As far as cuts go, if the rich would pay their fair share, even if it's just proportional to the amount of wealth they control, the cuts wouldn't need to be as deep to services.
> Will the government hold a server fire sale? Count me in!"
I would guess not. Rather than dilute the server market, negatively affect server manufacturers' profit margins and chance a bad news event, (and incidentally have to admit to bad planning) they'll crush the servers.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hey, I just made my first car anthology!
You always remember your first.
Muffins for all!
So what's the difference between bush being told they are necessary for data retention and funding vs obama completing construction and continuing funding?
When the administration was new, they were told these were "necessary." When they learned that was a lie, they stopped funding at the earliest opportunity. Where's the fault in that?
Learn to love Alaska
Obama move policy to a smarter government.
republicans cut funding
Obama's fault.
The republicans are giong after ANYHTING Obama does. Why isn't everyoen getting pissed at that? This isn't a sie of the isle complaint. Even when Republican create a bill, and then when Obama agrees and says will sign sign it, the republicans who created the bill back out. WTF?
There is a difference between having a debate and simple going against something because the president is for it.
They would rather the country burned to the ground, the Obama getting elected again.
I've been paying attention to politics since Reagan, and never has it been like this.
Add to that a bunch of people who refuse to accept the established fact that austerity during a recession never works. Look at history.
It's stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Surely the fiscally responsible approach is to shut down the oldest datacenters first."
you've never done this on legacy large scale enterprise systems, have you?
What make economic sense is to keep doing it and with time get rid of the older systems.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's not Obama, it's the budget cuts the were forced on us.
They are being shit down because of the current republicans. They shouldn't be, and the government should be doing more of this with their data.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Of course what the Affordable Care Act cut in Medicare was the subsidies for Medicare Advantage plans that cost 10-20% more than just straight Medicare. In the future, after a phase out period, those people choosing Medicare Advantage won't be subsidized above what regular Medicare recipients receive.
It's also Obama who signed the recent debt deal.
What's the point in voting for a Democrat when they're just going to do the exact same thing as a Republican? (Or maybe worse: when Bush was Pres, 6-year-olds didn't have to worry about being molested at airports.)