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

[SJHillman]

"If you count every group of servers stashed in an office somewhere as a "data center", most big companies have thousands. "

My office is officially a data center. One of our legacy 2000 servers, with only fan fan still working (barely), has been in my office since January while the main and secondary server rooms undergo renovation. With the fans dead, it makes for a pretty quiet office mate. It also gives me an excuse to keep my office's a/c cranked down low.

We also have a couple of servers that we're not sure where they are. They're on the network, they work fine, we just don't know where they're physically located anymore...

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.

Re:depressingly common in industry also

[Rude Turnip]

Chances are they are now drywalled in somewhere and inaccessible without a rooster bar.

This just in

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Server closets?

[mcalchera]

According to the testimony by the General Services Administration's director, a data center is

now defined as “a closet, room, floor or building for the storage, management, and dissemination of data and information. Such a repository houses computer systems and associated components, such as database, application, and storage systems and data stores. A data center generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (air conditioning, fire suppression) and special security devices housed in leased (including by cloud providers), owned, collocated, or stand-alone facilities.

Consolidation doesn't always save money

[CanadianMacFan]

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.