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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."
Under a Republican administration government grows exponentially and it takes a Democratic president to get things back under control.
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.
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.
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.