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Feds Now Plans To Close 1,200 Data Centers

Posted by timothy on from the hand-the-keys-to-carl-malamud dept.

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."

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What qualifies as a "Data Center"? by Entrope · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. I work on this effort and it's horribly misguided by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.