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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."
The memos that talk about the data centers make the criteria clear. A "data center is defined as: *Any room that is greater than 500 square feet and devoted to data processing; and, * Meets one of the tier (I, II, III & IV) classifications defined by the Uptime Institute."
If you are surprised that the US Federal government has more than 3,000 of those -- welcome to the (not-so-)new bureaucracy, trying hard to pretend it is a technocracy.
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.
Clinton had a budget surplus.
If you want to give credit to government figures for the nearly balanced budget, then you have to give it to the Republicans.
One of the first things the House did in 1995 was to vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment. The bill passed the House 300 to 132. 98% of the representatives that voted against it in the House were Democrats.
The Senate picked up the bill but their 65 to 35 vote failed the 2/3rd majority needed. 94% of the representatives that voted against it in the Senate were Democrats.
The Republicans no longer take balancing the budge seriously, but back then they did. They controlled House and Senate at the time, so it was Republican budgets that were passed all through the Clinton years.
Stop listening to what the politicians are saying, and start watching what they are doing. And for fucks sakes if you are a liberal and you arent armed with stuff that you know are facts.. just shut the fuck up, because you guys are notorious for Big Lies.. for example, the guy I replied to and the army of liberals that say the exact same thing.
"His name was James Damore."
Sure, the government doesn't generate any wealth whatsoever, they just:
1) Allow wealth generation to happen at all (by maintaining roads, public transit, police forces, fire departments, and other services necessary to the functioning of a modern society)
2) Encourage wealth generation indirectly (by providing free or subsidized education that creates a more knowledgeable population, by providing libraries, museums, and other cultural institutes that extend that availability of education (artistic, cultural, and technical) to interested adults, etc.)
3) Encourage wealth generation directly (by investing in research and public works projects that corporations are unwilling or unable to fund, but which corporations often directly benefit from)
4) Provide social services which aim to keep people as contributing members of society, rather than let them slide into (nigh-irrecoverable) homelessness. (And, while it is easy and sometimes correct to say that individuals in such a position are there because of their own poor decisions, the reality is that they will, without alternative opportunities, likely turn to a life of crime that costs us -- either our safety if we let them continue to perpetrate crime, or a larger sum of money if we imprison them securely.)
inflation undermining the dollar's value
You should note that inflation has been historically low over the past 4 years.
Also, the USD has gained value relative to other widely circulated currencies since the Global economy turned downward in 2007.