Slashdot Mirror
Feds Now Plans To Close 1,200 Data Centers
1sockchuck writes "The U.S. government now expects to shutter at least 1,200 data centers by the end of 2015 in its data center consolidation project. That's about 40 percent of the IT facilities identified in the latest update from federal CIO Steven VanRoekel. The number of government data centers has grown steadily — jumping from 1,100 to 2,094 and now to 3,133 — as the Obama administration has identified more facilities than expected, and expanded the initiative to target telecom closets. The CIO's office says it is on track to close 525 facilities by the end of this year, and has published a list of data centers targeted for closure."
Under a Republican administration government grows exponentially and it takes a Democratic president to get things back under control.
FEDS NOW PLAN! Argh!! Double check subby, its not that friggen hard!
Are they selling them cheap?
I'm counting down the days until the "Feds Now Plan to Open 1,200 Data Centers" Slashdot story when the consolidate/separate pendulum swings back the other way. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for maximizing resource utilization and reducing unnecessary duplication, but do wonder what's being sacrificed in the process. Hopefully just unnecessary PHBs...
Government auction? That's a lot of computer bits...
No. What is probably happening is that data centers are being consolidated to locations in Illinois. For some strange reason many of the President's projects favor that state.
3,133 Data Centers? Does some computer-savvy worker taking some initiative to back up the PC's in the Outer Podunk Forestry Station by sticking a cheap NAS box in the closet underneath the shelves of tree-climbing gear count as a "Data Center"?
The unemployment rate for servers is going to skyrocket.
I applaud the efforts to consolidate and streamline government to prevent waste. However, the government, at least in Homeland Security, has no idea what they are doing when it comes to managing the data centers. They want to consolidate ALL Homeland Security assets into TWO data centers. Firstly, from a security perspective, two isn't really enough...need a bit more diversity than that (though certainly not the hundreds out there).
Worse yet is that one is not even owned by the government, but rather a Fortune computer company...which means that when the contract is up, they can increase the rates exorbitantly so, and the government has nothing they can do about it. Why? Because otherwise they would need to migrate all of these systems, which takes several years, at least. Way to go.
The contracts are already so screwed up...e.g. if we need to recable a government system, and we go and do the work, the company which owns the datacenter contract still gets paid as if they did the work. But we have to do it, because they always screw it up. Whoever wrote those contracts should be shot by us tax-payers.
Further, both are in flood zones, one is in a frequent hurricane zone (lightning/wind already took out our power systems once), and both are relatively east coast...really poor choices, geographically.
Oh right, and let's not forget that with all these systems migrating over, we are now seeing significant power and space concerns in the data centers. Shocked? Did the government ever determine the combined, used square footage of existing data centers and compare that with the data centers we are migrating to? I doubt it, or we wouldn't have such stupid issues. I'm sorry, but these data centers the government is migrating to are large, but by no means the largest I've ever seen. And they expect over 3000 data centers to roll up in them.
It's like they never went to kindergarten and are trying to jam a massive round ball into a tiny square hole with a big plastic hammer.
Sadly I wish we knew 100% for sure these closures and other initiatives were about really saving money. Look at the very one-sided, corporate-commercial-cloud-services-or-die Defense bill recently signed into law. Someone just got a huge lobbying bonus.
Now there's a great idea, let's put highly sensitive DoD traffic into the same data centers as any other person can buy space into... instead of using the DoD's own cloud computing centers that are located in secure facilities, have dedicated staff with clearances, and have already consolidated hundreds of systems.
I wonder how these Congrescritters figure we're supposed to safely outsource all the highly classified email and data traffic that they just decided to no longer consolidate within the DoD's management. Or worse, how do they intend for all this to comply with the mountain of security protocols they have to follow even for unclassified traffic -- let alone stop another WikiLeaks from happening?
Please lie to me and tell me this will be followed by government auction colos, with fat pipes already laid. Might be a good time to pick up rack space cheap. Or we might be just looking at lists of broom closets with two poweredge 1850s in them.
Seriously though, federal auctions are the best place to get used, yet reasonably current hardware cheap. I got a laptop a year ago which still has warranty left that way (had to add a hdd).
The FAA has it's headquarters in DC (makes sense) major offices in Seattle (Boeing/Aerospace) and Chicago (Boeing and major flight hub) - all make sense. The FAA's big data center is in... Oklahoma City.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Guy's dead on. I see it, too. For extra fun, sometimes "closing" a data center means throwing away all the working equipment and buying completely new equipment to replace it in a different data center. I have no earthly idea how they think they're going to save any money. They just get a metric in their head and run with it. Fewer data centers is better, no matter what, right?
...and supposedly "tax and spend liberal" presidents actually shrinking debt.
I don't know what the savings are with these DC closures...the article doesn't say. But tell me where in these numbers you see a liberal shrinking the debt http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm - probably hosted on a server in one of the soon to be shuttered DCs...
And Chicago is full of them.
Why don't you close down those "datacenters" in the phone company closets, too.
So, anyone know where I can go to try and purchase some of this hardware? My guess is it will be sold off extremely cheap.
Need a few more dev servers!
"1,200 data centers" sounds more impressive until you also "target telecom closets".
I assume most of those DoD sites will be moving to DISA. Having priced the cost to move our server farm to the OKC DISA site, I can tell you that it is far from a cost savings move, as it would actually increase costs by a factor of 10, as well as decrease response time to system events due to a lack of direct server access (software not physical).
Consolidation within the Govt. is rarely as clean and smart as in the private sector, and never as cost effective.
Clinton also had the most ridiculous economy in the last hundred years.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve 'some' credit for not spending it all, but the surplus was more related to how fast the economy was growing than a cut-back in government spending.
Why should spending be cut and revenue not increased? Why is a smaller government superior to a larger government?
They are not needed anymore because:
1) the big hardware vendors already made their money
2) the contractors who installed and configured the hardware already made their money
3) the corrupt purchasing officials have already made their money from the bribes they got from the hardware vendors and the contractors
4) the software vendors will keep racking up software maintenance fees since all those physical servers will become VMs
It's called "greed computing".
lucm, indeed.
Why is a smaller government superior to a larger government?
Freedom
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I feel your pain.
> if we need to recable a government system, and we go and do the work, the company which owns the datacenter contract still gets paid as if they did the work. But we have to do it, because they always screw it up.
It's not just governments that trap themselves into this kind of contract.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It's like they never went to kindergarten and are trying to jam a massive round ball into a tiny square hole with a big plastic hammer.
This is like, the most accurate description of most governments in control right now.
They are clueless as to how to manage resources correctly most of the time, typically ignoring even the most basic points around said resources.
Such as the fact that a war could break out any time, or flood, or hell, a supervolcano. Yellowstone is certainly a lot weaker that it has been previously, and we did survive it back in the extremely early stages of human development, but it would still do some serious damage to North America.
It's like they are completely ignoring some of the best research we have done the past decade, ARPAnet. Use the same methods, no less than 5 around NON vital areas of the country, sorted. Better if it is in that mountain, in fact. If the Stargate can survive in there, damn it so can whatever these data centers hold.
Are you sure the Clarksville DC is in a floodzone? Lake Kerr has a dam you know...
Just look at the list, this isn't a closing of data centers, it's pretending to close them and over counting the same site multiple times. For example, The Department of Commerce has half a dozen "data centers" on the list. Guess what, they are all at the same address! 1401 Constituion Ave, they are ROOMS in the same building in some cases on the same floor! And yet they each get counted as a data center. This isnt closing anything down, its moving things ino less rooms and counting each room as a center. This is just playing numbers and claiming a result that isn't real, hoping no one will look at the details. Moving gear from one room to another isn't closing a data CENTER. And the list goes on and on, they are overcounting like crazy. This is like claiming you had a 3200% increase in dental hygine at a School because one student brushed their teeth, and counting each tooth separately.
Actually if the data centers contracted do shoddy work can't they be pursued for breach or a false claims act?
Just because it's the feds doesn't mean its magically ok to screw them.
sure, they close down a lot. but have you seen any budgets shrink? no, we are at a massive, mind boggling record. if you asked people in the 80s if we would ever get this deep, 10 trillion plus, they would have said we were insane. but its happened.
TARP, the iraq war, etc etc etc. who got the money? who owns the debt?
Obama should have shut down Citigroup, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and the other bailed-out banks that have IT operations scattered all over the planet. Ask JP Morgan if it has fully integrated and 'streamlined' all of the crap it bought with Bear Stearns? Ask one division of Citigroup if it has any idea how to communicate with another - ask Citigroup's IT managers if they even have a half-decent estimate of what kinds of software licenses their massive, behemoth organization has. They won't be able to give you an answer. And yet, our tax dollars bailed them out and continue to do so.
So Obama closed a bunch of federal IT shops. Sorry, not impressed.
the data centers count you!!!
and a crapload of other aviation stuff that has been in oklahoma historically.
anyways.
Same thing is happening at my work. They are doing massive DC consolidation to the east coast. The fail-over DC is also on the east coast. Smart thinking!!!
What also gets me is part of the consolidation is for possible company divestitures. The only thing is they want to close a DC in a bldg where the potential divestiture will occur. So we close a DC only to sell the business in the bldg requiring them to reopen a DC and migrate everything back into it.
Welcome to topsy-turvy land. We've actually been here for awhile, with "fiscal conservative" presidents and legislatures growing the national debt and supposedly "tax and spend liberal" presidents actually shrinking debt.
It's bizarre how perverted the discussion has become due to the focus on deficit and debt. There is a reasonable political debate to be had on the question of whether government should be small or large. Should the government be responsible for maintaining basic infrastructure? For education? And so on.
But these questions should not be confused with discussions about the deficit and debt, at least on the federal level. The deficit is mostly endogenous. That is economist-speak for saying that the deficit is not directly controlled by political decision. Instead, it is largely the result of what happens in the private sector. If the private sector produces a lot of activity, this automatically results in higher tax payments and therefore a lower government deficit. If the private sector is running idle, tax revenue drops while at the same time federal outlays in social programs increase, hence the government deficit increases. Therefore, it is best to just let the deficit be whatever it needs to be. That is the approach of Functional Finance, which greatly influenced Modern Monetary Theory.
Stop worrying about the deficit or the debt. They are meaningless, red herrings. Start worrying about real things instead, like crumbling infrastructure or high unemployment - both are things that can very easily be fixed simultaneously at the federal level, if the deficit terrorists are finally silenced.
This is a good thing IMAO. I know several people hired from the private sector to make this happen. The people that i know are well qualified. The consolidation will reduce cost and allow for a more centralized management approach. I am convinced this is what we need, and for once can keep my tinfoil hat safely off. Lets put our collective focus back to defeating SOPA...
Please please anonymously submit a complaint to your congressman about this issue. I'm absolutely sick of seeing the government write horrible contracts. How the hell do they manage to do this with so many lawyers working for them?
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
Because some powerful senator's got the benefiting private company in his district.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Indeed, at a previous employer one group of our data centers or co-locations had some pretty lousy techs. I had worked over the phone to remotely have some one off equipment cabled up and it was complete fail sauce. Eventually, I decided to stop wasting our money as I was scheduled to go out to do maintenance anyway. My cabling worked quite fine and the time they wasted would have paid for the flight and hotel.
Oddly, they had to borrow my onsite equipment to do the work as well. We kept fully stocked shelves for virtually every need. Even so far as to providing our own server lift. (I felt bad for the guys so my thoughts were you can borrow it, but I don't want to know in case you hurt yourselves.)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Further, both are in flood zones, one is in a frequent hurricane zone (lightning/wind already took out our power systems once), and both are relatively east coast...really poor choices, geographically.
What are you talking about? The state representative who chose that location received a solemn promise of a stable consulting job at a tech company with an outrageously large salary, and as a result created jobs in his/her district by offering the most tax breaks to the private company to set up that data center in that flood zone. It is in a perfect location geographically.
Or when you said "perfect" you meant they could have found safer geographic location to run data processing equipment? Phffft. What do you know about politics?
Seems this /Federal-Government-Finances-and-Employment site is a labryth of broken code and malfunctioning daemons on "servers" that should have never been given the task of "serving".
No wonder the GAO had such a slog to find the amonut of real USA taxpayer money funneled by the Executive Branch i.e. phoney-baloney Presidential White House Committees into the UN's IPCC.
I'll wager that Al Cappone would have wanted such as this.
Of course the results of any government mandated reduction is an explosion of growth. The first thing to happen is an audit to identify all these facilities. It gets passed up the food chain where some under deputy flunky discovers the true size of his or her empire. Then they all move in unison to protect their own at everyone else's expense. This results in everything being reclassified as critical, they are all protected and then they discover how to exploit their own budget process to make them grow and grow.
Worse yet is that one is not even owned by the government, but rather a Fortune computer company...which means that when the contract is up, they can increase the rates exorbitantly so, and the government has nothing they can do about it. Why? Because otherwise they would need to migrate all of these systems, which takes several years, at least. Way to go.
While this could happen, I doubt it will. There are probably a dozen companies eager and ready to scoop up that contract. If the costs of the incumbent contractor are too high, they will loose the recompeat, and at best get a small one or two year extension so the facility can be migrated. They could end up getting black-balled (informally anyway) for trying to take advantage of the situation. Most companies want to keep the government's business once they win it, and move heaven and Earth to win those recompeats.
So consider a lab with 2 racks of equipment in it. It is considered a data center. A big part of this effort is to consolidate equipment like that into an actual data center environment (with proper cooling and power) and weed out what is not needed (there is a lot of it). Virtualizing servers where applicable is also going to help save power, which is what part of this initiative is aiming for.
We have virtualized something like ~200 physical servers in our Data Center. Most were End Of Life (HP DL G4 360's and 380's) and were virtualized instead of replaced.
Our main DataCenter (Class 2?) has functionally freed more than 1/2 of it's space, and had departmental servers from "other Server Rooms" (aka: 10'x25' rooms with two racks) moved down there.
Do you really want an old HP G4 server that takes only SCSI drives, and runs a single core processor? I don't. OTOH, next time a cooling unit goes down, the room should still be cooled now ;)
As someone on the ground floor of all of this (A local Network Admin in the Fed), I think this entire initiative is more PR, and bad management than anything else. I've heard of "closing" a "Data Center" by demolishing a wall between 2 adjacent computing rooms that had a separate agency set of equipment in each. This was reported as , "closing" one, and reporting the other as a "consolidation parent." Same power, lighting, HVAC, physical security, fault tolerance, and localized IT personnel, but now reported savings based on "average Data Center cost / year" ... success?
TBH - and I probably shouldn't be saying this, but what the hell - It feels like upper management is shuffling its feet: waiting to see if they actually have to go through with the proposed changes or if a new term or a new president will shift priorities.
Gotta agree. I know of more than one USAF owned Data Center that have less than 25% usage. Instead of consolidating USAF resources into the unused and almost brand new datacenter on an USAF owned and operated installation we are putting resources into the IBM owned and operated ABL and paying IBM for the privilege.
Why not consolidate into your own facilities? Because the US CIO made some off-hand comment about the ABL and consolidating into and all of a sudden that is the directive when the CIO meant consolidate intelligently and if it makes sense use the ABL.
The republicans and democrats are not flip sides. Americans like simple answers even when simple answers are not adequate and this ethos of the culture causes a great many of the nations problems (but they do not full grasp this because again, they cling to simple short answers.)
I would argue that a large reason for the two party duopoly is a reflection of the culture.
I've volunteered at both just for the experience. They differ greatly. Republicans are a more authoritarian culture and the Democrats are more anarchy (not really socialist.) It is somewhat ironic the anti-government group is more authoritarian but it makes sense as you dig deeper.
Ever hear of herding cats? That is the democrats. The Republicans are dogs herding sheep. Informed people should understand what I'm saying (sorry if your a sheep who prides yourself on your "independent" thinking.)
High corruption issues are above everything, then the two party illusion breaks momentarily.
I'm a promoter of politicalcompass.org because the 1D model is idiotic; the 2D grid is far superior. If we ever get people to grasp that and Americans to just use a 1D spectrum (which is more than right++,right,middle,left,left++ they seem to glaze over if you try to even explain the 2D model) maybe we can make some progress before we over populate ourselves into a nightmare.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news