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US Government Data Center Count Rises To 7,000
miller60 writes "The U.S. government keeps finding more data centers. Federal agencies have about 7,000 data centers, according to the latest stats from the ongoing IT consolidation process. The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers. The latest estimate is more than double the 3,300 facilities the government thought it had last year. The process has led to the closure of 484 data centers thus far, with another 855 planned over the next year. The GAO continues to call for the process to look beyond the number of facilities and focus on savings."
Yep. The saving of all of your data transmitted over the internet, or on a cell phone. Lots of saving going on.
If you count every group of servers stashed in an office somewhere as a "data center", most big companies have thousands. Tech companies may take things slightly more seriously, but big non-tech companies have data scattered everywhere, often in poorly organized network drives full of Excel spreadsheets and Word docs. That's why you end up with things like a petrochemical company losing blueprints when an office moves and some random machines get lost in the shuffle.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureauacracy. Slow news day on Slashdot? This is like saying "Congress is screwing up the country again." Well, duh. I could live in a cave and still call that one.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I guess that if you love intercepting & storing people's supposedly _private_ data, then you need more and more data centers to do that. ------ 50 years from now, high school students will be given an assignment to research our current "data interception craze", and those students will have a tough time understanding what happened in 2013. -----
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
We had Clinton, master of the sex scandal. We had Bush, starter of unnecessary wars. We have Obama, supervising the agencies that spy on the people that elected him.
Why isn't he more vocal on this? Where are his calls to reform the spy agencies and protect the citizens of the USA?
His failure to control this situation will be his legacy.
Fortunately for the American, government workers are overall inefficient and bad at their jobs. Therefore, I would safely assume that 65% of these data centers are "down for maintenance" and another 30% are experiencing "technical difficulties", meaning the 5% of data centers are actually storing anything.
But alas, not all is lost. Since these government workers at the data centers have little/nothing to do, they hang out on Slashdot.
sudo make me a sandwich
I'm not convinced that count is correct. Anybody have a list of locations for all these data centers?
we'll have to burn to the ground for great justice.
So for every local or branch office that has a WAN router and a domain controller is now the same as a 500,000 sq ft data center?
What do they mean by server closets? If it's less than 10 racks it certainly isn't a data center.
If they give it all to Amazon or Rackspace they could save a fortune. There is no way any government agency could run data centers for anything near what Amazon is charging.
"The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers. The latest estimate is more than double the 3,300 facilities the government thought it had last year." So basically by redefining what they consider a data center, there was an "explosion" in the statistics. Except they were already paying for all 7000 data centers. If anything, this should make closing and consolidating easier since the departments now have a better idea of the equipment that's out there.
I refuse to call it a list of 'data centers', because of their changing definition of what a 'data center' is, but you used to be able to get lists from data.gov ... unfortunately, they've now got so much stuff in there that it's hard to find much of anything. The project to shut everything down goes by the name FDCCI:
http://www.data.gov/search/node/FDCCI
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
they are completely useless in stopping known terrorists from carrying out attacks.
The number started at 432 in 1999, but soon began to rise as agencies found more facilities, and exploded once the Obama administration decided to include server closets as well as dedicated data centers.
Much ado about nothing. Looks like someone invested in virtualization got the ear of someone with influence at the GAO.
It seems a little shortsighted to include all office service closets since there are good reasons to keep some data close to the people that work on it so the office doesn't need to shut down when their network connection goes down, plus they get much better fileserver performance on the LAN. Much better to have a replicated fileserver, AD controller, etc in a branch office so they can continue to work even without network connectivity.
If they shut down every server closet they may end up saving money on datacenters only to lose much more money in lost productivity.
You know... I would really like for them to not be able to use my tax dollars to track me. It's rather insulting really...
It's not 100%, but business class lines guarantee 99.9% connectivity. Not really a concern, or the cloud concept would've died long ago. Nobody walks over and pops in physical cds into their servers anymore I hope.
Tell me, with all this and the news of the massive NSA metadata trolling (even outsourcing to private companies), can anyone explain to me why U.S. veterans are waiting for years just to have their medical claims even looked at let alone processed in even the smallest way?
Anyone? Anyone at all?
It's not 100%, but business class lines guarantee 99.9% connectivity. Not really a concern, or the cloud concept would've died long ago. Nobody walks over and pops in physical cds into their servers anymore I hope.
I had 28 hours of downtime spanning 2 business days on my 99.9% T3 line a couple years ago when heavy rains flooded a junction box and took out both the T3 and backup T1's. We have a 10 gigabit pipe into our main fileserver, and now have a 100Mbit link to the internet. Having 700 users accessing files over a 100Mbit link would not give satisfactory performance, and a couple months of 10Gig internet bandwidth would cost more than a small server farm to provide local servers.
You think the government pays for modern business class lines!?! You're funny!
We get about 98% --at best-- to the outside internet, and maybe about 99.5% on this installation's LAN. Most of the downtimes occur during peak operating hours, too. The LAN itself is fast enough, but we still only have a 2x T3 connection to the outside world that's shared by about 2000 employees.
I was working in one department of the government and we were building our own data centre around 2004 because the cost of using the shared services (the group set up for all departments to share IT infrastructure) was astronomical. It was far cheaper for us to build our own data centre, put in new servers, and hire the support staff. Basically the people running the shared services thought that they could charge what ever they wanted because the departments were not able to outsource to anyone else. And with them thinking that they were the only show in town the service was terrible with no incentive to improve service or cost.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The provider offers the guarantee not the government fucktard. Also, seems you like to make up things. I think I hear your mom calling.
The solution to your downtime that i've seen is to have a backup ISP basically with a dynamic DNS failover. Not simple by any means, but do-able. However hosting offsite at least eliminates the dynamic DNS failover piece. It's also true an entire data center can go down, so a part of an advanced redundancy plan for that is to have colo's spread out in geography. I really hope on a business line you don't pay by the gigabit, that would be vicious. And lastly, it makes perfect sense to have 1 local server in many cases with that being... the file server, preferably replicating to a colo for redundancy.
What should've happened in your case though, if the 99% guarantee was in your contract, is you should've called them on it and been compensated for breach of contract by the ISP.