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."

Comments

"Focus on the savings."

[houstonbofh]

Yep. The saving of all of your data transmitted over the internet, or on a cell phone. Lots of saving going on.

depressingly common in industry also

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:depressingly common in industry also

[sys_mast]

....Off topic, but in response to parents "lost" servers.

Since you know they are online you must have the IP. If you have any decent manageable switch gear you should be able to trace down what switch port it is connected to. At that point follow the cable.

The commands;
show mac
show arp
pipe into an include filter for the IP and MAC, those commands are your best friends ;)

Re:depressingly common in industry also

[NatasRevol]

Have them beep until someone locates them.