Feds Discover 1,000 More Government Data Centers 246
1sockchuck writes "The US government has 2,094 data centers, nearly 1,000 more than previous estimates, according to an updated inventory by federal agencies. The finding underscores the scope of the challenge facing the Obama administration as it seeks to streamline the government's IT infrastructure in a massive data center consolidation."
Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:5, Insightful)
Any Presidential administration that comes into the federal government promising to combat bureaucracy and duplication is either lying (most likely) or is truly epically deluded. No agency in the federal government is going to let some johnny-come-lately President who's going to be gone in 4-8 years come in and fundamentally change the way they've worked for 60 years or more. Oh sure, they'll TELL him they'll do it. They kiss the ass of their new director (aka his political toadie appointee, also to be gone in 4-8 years). But the most they'll *actually* do is stall, make token gestures, lie, and basically find other ways to run out the clock until the next administration comes in (with a whole new set bullshit streamlining promises). There are long-term professionals in these agencies who've been playing out that scenario since the Carter administration (maybe even some old Nixon/Ford guys).
Bill Clinton said it best (and I'm paraphrasing here) "The most shocking thing I discovered about the Presidency is that people don't do what you say."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bill Clinton said it best (and I'm paraphrasing here) "The most shocking thing I discovered about the Presidency is that people don't do what you say."
Isn't that how it's supposed to work? If everybody had to do as he said, we'd call the position Dictator instead of President. The president has very limited power, which is a good thing.
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So fire them. Hire someone that will do as you say. CEO's do it in the real world every single day. And if there are laws in your way, get those changed first. Failing that, line-item-veto any spending for their salaries and wait for them to quit. Failing even that, use your executive ability to set their schedules to nil, or require them to report to Alaska, etc.
It really isn't that hard.
People made this same argument towards Ron Paul's campaign promises, and they failed to see the same simplicity of
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or you just pay out the contract...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's also worth pointing out that the federal civil service, which many regard as a serious problem because it makes it hard to fire people witho
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:4, Informative)
If ruling were so simple... (Score:3, Interesting)
So fire them. Hire someone that will do as you say.
Not always possible. Lots of federal employees are unionized. Lots more of them don't actually report to the president, even indirectly. Even those that do are much harder to hire/fire than you suppose and most really important jobs actually require Congressional approval. We limit the President's power for very good reasons and while this has some undesirable side effects, I'm not about to vote to give anyone unlimited power over staffing in the federal government.
CEO's do it in the real world every single day.
The president isn't a CEO and the two
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A) New people are more likely to do as they're told.
Ha! Have you ever actually managed anyone? I have and what you just said is complete nonsense.
There's zero reason the Federal government needs to employ millions of people
Perhaps but the fact is that they do employ that many people and that isn't likely to change.
Congress has no Constitutional authority over how the executive branch is structured. E.g. 'czars'.
Congress has immense formal and informal power over how the executive branch is structured and how it operates. From the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause: "...make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. But onne would expect that the career bureaucrats would take some pride in doing the best job that they can. The whole "We've been doing it this way for decades and when you're gone in 4 years, we'll still will be" is pure bullshit. We need some way to motivate them to pursue continuous process improvement. Then, the proper function of the administration is to watch over the operations and make policy decisions. Not nit-pick the data center architecture. On the other hand, when the administration calls
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, pride in a job well done won't get them anywhere. Trust me - pride in quality is no better in the federal government than in any major corporation. In the company I work for we'd still have data centers in every closet in every building and armies of shadow IT if business leaders didn't know that they'd be shown the door if they didn't comply with corporate directives.
Who wants to depend on some external server group to maintain their servers, when instead they could just have their own group doing th
Re: (Score:2)
That's how it's supposed to work overall. That's not how it's supposed to work within the Executive Branch, of which the President is the head officer. When your boss gives you a legal order, you're supposed to obey it.
Re: (Score:2)
*Everybody* isn't supposed to do what he says, then he'd be a dictator. Everyone who works for the executive branch of the government is supposed to to follow his work related policies, just as you are expected to follow the policies of the president of your company. He's the head of the executive branch, he has a reasonable expectation that his employees will do what he tells them too. They don't. At the levels below the political appointees they weasel around doing the minimum possible to appease whoev
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of Obama, I think he truly believed that he would be able to change things once he was in a position of "real" power. Except when he got elected, he found out that the president isn't a position of "real" power after all...you're hands are tied when it comes to MANY things.
I don't think his promises have been broken, so much as had reality injected in them.
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:4, Interesting)
And, to be honest, its one reason I didn't vote for him. As soon as I understood that he had no idea how the government actually works, I knew the only thing that was going to happen was that he was going to simply add to the government. Not because he's some sort of big government liberal, but because adding to the government is all that the bureaucracy lets you do without specialized knowledge of how the bureaucracy works.
The Tea Party people really have no chance either. Their only value in my mind is that they will gridlock the addition of more crap to the government. I have more sympathy with their aims, but I know full well that outsiders have no chance at meaningful change unless it is accomplished via tearing down the whole edifice.
The real challenge is not throwing the bums out or creating "Change", its finding knowledgeable insiders who know how to get things done in the bureaucracy. People who can ease out the holdouts from their fiefdoms, who can soothe the Civil Service unions, and who can gain the trust of multiple administrations so that they have the ability to actually do something worth doing. I almost think that as soon as the President wins an election, he or she needs to go and campaign at every federal office building and get those people on his side.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is really the only reason why the tea party movement is even in
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I should have saved my earlier post for you, because perhaps you'll be able to explain it to me...
Let's take a concrete example or three. I'll propose some executive solutions to the problems, and you tell me why it won't work:
1) End the wars. President uses Commander-in-Chief authority to redeploy every single unit, or just the desired units, to the United States, effective immediately. Anyone not obeying the order will be brought up for court martial. Failing that, simply veto any spending bills until
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:4, Interesting)
Voters do not want a sudden, humiliating withdrawl from Afghanistan that would be an admission of defeat. (Others would argue saving face isn't worth sacrificing lives, but I digress...)
Voters do not want to balance the budget. What they want is to pay no taxes when young, and receive full benefits when old. And who they vote for is whoever promises to do that.
It's just human nature. Almost every person thinks THEY are the one doing more than their fair share, and what they want is for everybody else to start bucking up and being more like them. Just like a big marriage among 300,000,000 people.
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:4, Interesting)
As we've seen with Obama's attempt to reduce commitments in Afghanistan, against the will of the generals, it's practically impossible for a president to reduce troop deployments without the support of the generals, particularly as long as the party in opposition supports an open-ended commitment. The generals simply leak the content of their meetings to the war party, and leak negative stories about the policy decisions to the press, and work to eliminate and marginalize people who offer solutions that reduce commitments beneath what the generals think "will accomplish the mission." It would be easy for Obama to end the war at the cost of his presidency, of course, but why bother when your replacement will be an ultra-hawk Republican who will simply re-escalate? That's really the issue, there's a lot of competition for people to prove themselves the most belligerent, because there really isn't much of a consensus for ending the war among conservatives or liberals.
All cabinet-level departments are created by acts of congress; a president cannot abrogate an act of congress. A failure to appoint a head will cause the civil-service interim appointee to run the department. Congress will attempt the fund the department through omnibus legislation.
The President of the US has no line-item veto, because it's unconstitutional. The president has no right to dictate how the US spends its money, this is the responsibility of the House of Representatives. There is no evidence that people really want to eliminate the deficit. The deficit is a fundamentally popular institution and people would never vote someone out of office for increasing it. And deficit reformers, instead of actually trying to win the argument on the merits and win elections, propose ever more dictatorial powers for their great white hope, that one man who will, Cincinnatus-like, ride to the rescue of America, use untrammeled king-like authority to set the nation straight, and then disappear. The requirement that a president either affirm or veto bills in full is a fundamental check on executive power.
You call for dictatorship, if only to deal with the immediate crisis, but that's how it always starts... Congress is the institution in our system that prevents dictatorship. If you take powers away from congress and hand them to the president, you break the system.
The problem is that people don't actually vote for senators and representatives they respect any more, people who can -- they just vote for the person who has the highest propensity for giving them what they ask for.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"It would be easy for Obama to end the war at the cost of his presidency, "
What presidency, He's treated like a lame-duck president before the mid-term elections of his first term. Actually calling him a lame duck is being generous, He's more like a turtle on a post,
You know he didn't get up there by himself,
he doesn't belong up there,
he doesn't know what to do while he's up there,
he's elevated beyond his ability to function, and you just wonder what kind of dumb asses put him up there to begin wit
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, I'll give you some straight answers as to why that's not going to happen, even if you were president tomorrow:
1- End the Wars. Actually, the wars are ending. But let's say tomorrow is your first day in office. Your order is "Redeploy all the units". The CJCS says "Yes, sir". First they need some time to come up with a plan on how to do what you want. So MINIMUM 60 days. Ever tried to get a family of five in the car for a 5-day road trip?? How many hours did that take? OK, now multiply that by 5
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming they're still paid, yes. It's called fraud.
If everyone just up and quit en masse, the president is required by law to replace them.
Nope. The only significant post created by executive order is the National Security Advisor and their subordinates. All the "Departments of ____" were created by statute.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps he should have done his homework [yes-minister.com] so that he might have more realistic expectations [tvtropes.org].
He might also be able to use simple civil service phrases like "Unfortunately, although the answer was indeed clear, simple, and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated and the facts, insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated, is such as to cau
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not talking about from a party standpoint, I mean just as an American Citizen standpoint.
From a party standpoint, I recognize that no one really wants things to change. As a person though, I honestly believe that he thought he could really make a difference. Note that this has nothing to do with what he's done since he got elected, nor does it have anything to do with my opinion of him now. I'm strictly referring to what I think made him want to be President in the first place.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
stall, make token gestures, lie, and basically find other ways to run out the clock until the next administration comes in...
Or as Sir Humphrey Appleby said:
"Indeed it is, beyond question, at the appropriate juncture, in due course, in the fullness of time."
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Silly President, streamlining's for wings (Score:4, Interesting)
The President can do a lot, he just has to sick someone else on the topic like a bull dog. He also has to be really picky about his battles.
I can think of many examples from situations I know of.
Exmaples:
You have to realize, the US government is too large to control from DC. It works best when there is central minimum requirements that vary with the task at hand and how you meet them is left up to some local manager.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not to say that you ignore the other ones, we're going to be permanently in debt unless we allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for the high earners, and we're going to have to cut government spending on defense to fund education and jobs programs. We're going to have to force companies that send jobs overseas to book profits before they book deductions like ones that are located an
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I was precisely thinking of that series while reading this thread! It's a very educational comedy.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, you've seen Yes Minister?
Re: (Score:2)
Bill Clinton said it best (and I'm paraphrasing here) "The most shocking thing I discovered about the Presidency is that people don't do what you say."
Which is why it's a good idea to elect a married man. He should be used to it. ;)
Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Possibly being chased by some legacy system throwing strange errors at him while he trying to escape a rolling ball of ethernet cables
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Indy: Ethernet cables. Why'd it have to be ethernet cables?
Big company (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your "couple of servers" probably doesn't meet the criteria for counting in this case:
"""
The process defined a data center as any room larger than 500 square feet dedicated to data processing that meets the one of the four tier classifications defined by The Uptime Institute.
"""
Now you could put a couple of servers in a 500 square feet room, but that seems pretty unlikely.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Your "couple of servers" probably doesn't meet the criteria for counting in this case:
I work at a F100 company and we have two data centers which are larger than 500sq/ft and house at least 100 physical boxes and a couple SANs each, yet the company/IT doesn't count them as part of their normal data center strategy. If you asked global IT if we had data centers at our site, they would say "nope".
Re:Big company (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Off course, there's always the problem that when you use the centrally managed resources, they're practically worthless. I work in a similar environment and doing everything ourselves is ~10x cheaper and much more flexible. Even outsourcing it to a commercial entity would be cheaper. 1TB of data does not need to cost $10k/year, (paid) e-mail boxes should not be limited to 250MB and you really don't need 8 Exchange admins to manage 8 Exchange servers (maybe you do, I have only worked with Postfix). The downs
Re: (Score:2)
A 500SF room will hold a UPS, CRAC unit, PDU, and 16 racks, if there is no raised floor. If you add in a 12" raised floor, you are down to space for 12 racks. While more than a "couple servers," it is one logical planning block up from a 200SF room, and you will see government organizations justify it for something needing a rack or two of networking equipment plus two racks of servers thinking this is the only time they will ever get money for their pet project.
What would be more telling is the space bre
Don't know who you work for (Score:2)
but if it appears on our network without previous authorization all hell breaks loose. Whether from internal or external auditors to just the network people freaking out. SOX reporting pretty much insures anything for us that can store information, even in transition, is documented, accounted for, and has its approvals all in order.
No, government is in a league of its own, there number of redundant programs and such is probably worthy of three to five years worth of investigation. They don't answer to an
Re: (Score:2)
Not on my network they don't. Nobody plugs anything into my network without IT involvement. And you may ask yourself "why" I would be such a BOFH. Because I need to know what VLAN to put the device in. No port is hot, unless I say it is hot. No device gets access unless I approve it and configure it to the right VLAN.
There would be no rogue servers. Anyone caught putting in a rogue server would be reported up the proper chain. It isn't hard to keep track of anything, if you keep track of everything. If you
Re: (Score:2)
Unless someone working for you enables the port and configures it to the VLAN, without actually counting it as an additional server.
The point GP was making is that if you are the only person to authorize port enablement and VLAN configuration, your network will be completely under your control. It is when you start authorising other people to start doing this stuff (which will have to happen in a large org (and no a one man IT is not an option)), things dont stay under your control.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But the government isn't one homogeneous organization. It's hundreds or thousands of agencies, field offices, departments, and units. All of them have purchasing authority. Any of them can have its own network. Some of them are so secret that even their inventory is classified. Some of them may be so secret that their very existence is classified. Many of these systems are so old and legacy that they were purchased before such concepts as "IT" department even exited.
This isn't a building, or even a lo
Re: (Score:2)
Dealing somewhat with classified networks, I can say that a BOFH wouldn't have any clue what servers a given program might be using. You might have a single subnet provided for the room, but that is all. Security is compartmentalized, which means you get exactly the information you need to do your job and nothing else. Each program controls their internal and external links pretty much, and if they can figure out a way to physically get a new rack in the room, and can hook up a breaker and some SO cord i
Re: (Score:2)
Rogue IT is not must for big companies (Score:2)
Anywhere you have IT governance that delivers more policies than solutions, rogue IT fills the gap.
In the case of the Federal government, I can imagine this getting out of hand. I wonder how many virtual machines are sitting there in the Amazon cloud quietly doing the government's business?
If Only ... (Score:2)
"hehe" (Score:2)
seriously though, stuff like this DOES happen. the UK Government just shut down what, hundreds of websites that they didn't even know they had been paying for?
sprawl != organised.
Re: (Score:2)
"Oh, HERE they are! silly buggers, I though you ran away!" seriously though, stuff like this DOES happen. the UK Government just shut down what, hundreds of websites that they didn't even know they had been paying for? sprawl != organised.
Indeed, but at least our government was able to shut them down - if a tenth of what I read about the US government is true (admittedly unlikely since most comes from places like /.), the President would have had a political fight on his hands to do the same. Seriously, the more I read about the alternatives, the more I like the Westminster system. Sure it could do with some tweaks (mostly in the way we vote), but in practice it's one of the best ways to run a representative democracy such as the US or UK.
Whats a datacenter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Whats a datacenter?
As a fedgov employee (US Army) in the early 90s I had two big green unisys btos machines each with three terminals running a database Admittedly no outside world connection except 110V AC but the terminal things did have at least a hundred feet of cable. For the purposes of this report, would by old office be defined as a "datacenter"?
Re:Whats a datacenter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
How big are your damn closets?
MAP PARENT UP (Score:2)
According to the article, linked memo, and linked data center tier definition, the meanest little closet holding a box with blinking lights is a "data center". The survey referenced does limit them to over 500 square feet but even that number can be kinda meaningless.
At this moment, I'm sitting on the other side of the wall from a "data center" for a major TLA. It was once a monstrosity with dozens of Pyramids the size of refrigerators, racks of Windows-based servers for files and email, and a few dozen U
MAP????? (Score:2)
Apparently, I can't spell "MOD". Or maybe I've been doing so many drive mappings this morning that I've just got "map" on the mind.
Sheesh...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I gamble that if they stopped looking at
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
From TFA: "The process defined a data center as any room larger than 500 square feet dedicated to data processing..."
Yeah but thats just an article. I mean, what really is a data center, the article can't possibly be correct.
I believe by the article definition we had two psuedo-datacenters, the btos machines and their terminals fit in a room with about eight desks (hmm, 8 keyboards and 8 crts, I sense a pattern here) plus the usual storage cabinets for backup tapes, a couple printer stands and stuff. And a "station" for barcode readers and printers. Well over 25x25 feet. But lets face it, it was just an office that ha
Re: (Score:2)
Why not try reading the article which contains the definition they used.
Re: (Score:2)
TFA: "The process defined a data center as any room larger than 500 square feet dedicated to data processing that meets the one of the four tier classifications defined by The Uptime Institute."
A Tier-1 facility is a server room or closet with basic power and cooling. If you have any kind of redundancy or failover that kicks you up to Tier-2.
So really, any lights-out environment over 500 feet qualifies.
I lost a datacenter (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I lost a datacenter (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Network would fallback to 3G or satellite uplink and your servers would be happily crunching onboard while your truck heads down the open road..
Re: (Score:2)
That's why we keep Bruce Willis on retainer.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Have you checked behind the dry wall? [theregister.co.uk]
Re: (Score:2)
tracert is your friend
Last hop is through some ISP called 'Wild Blue' [wildblue.com].
Now what?
what a horrible idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't we provide a small number of locations, the destruction of any of which would significantly cripple our government. I can't imagine who would find such a consolidation helpful to their goals.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because you have a lot of them, doesn't mean they're redundant or in any way coordinated.
Most are probably just a local chief/commander/boss saying "we need XYZ, get us some computers".
I can see some serious redundancy in DOD computers; basically you want each field unit to have some data center capability in case the grid goes down. They need to be able to run their own affairs at the very least.
But entities like the VA and the Education folks? They don't really need redundancy to any great extent;
Re: (Score:2)
But, the point is that since you have them consolidated to a small number of
good luck and Godspeed (Score:2)
i did a 1 year contracting stint at a US Army Corps of Engineers office 10 years ago. the DC was less than 10 servers in a closet for 140 people. the local offices had more people and more servers. in a few cases the local IT people refused to go with the mandated domain plan and kept separate domains. word was that the managers couldn't make them do it either. this was back in the NT4 days. with Windows 2003 and 2008 it's a lot easier to consolidate the domains and data centers but in the end they will hav
Were they lost? (Score:2)
I don't understand how you can "find" data centers? Can someone explain that to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It was not that these systems were "lost," but rather that they were not accounted for. I am not surprised -- various departments, subdep
Re: (Score:2)
Needless to say the auditor that I let into the closet was less than enthused by the situation.
Re: (Score:2)
I've got a small home network. It has a handful of IP cameras, a few access points, some wifi gadgets, a couple of laptops, and 3 "regular" computers.
As everything works, it's not unusual for me to lose track of some gadget after a year or two, or to notice a "new" gadget that's actually been there.
Now imagine that you have a 10,000 of these sorts of setups, but each has 1,000 nodes. And each has an admin or a group of admins that do what they need to to make their management happy. And now move the admi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's easy -- you ask people you've never asked before: "Hey, do you have any data centers?". In other words, no one was keeping track before. Missions/projects setup data centers as-needed, but were not required to report them as a new "data center" to anyone.
I don't think it's surprising to find that the estimate was wrong. I know that where I work, funding plays a huge part in the creation of "islands" of IT resources. Every project pays for their own resources, and no one wants to share. Until th
Your taxes at work (Score:4, Insightful)
In a normal business, you serve a client.
In government, the client is yourself, and you must "justify" that position with lots of public activity.
That activity does not need to be effective, it only needs to look effective. By definition, there's less risk in ineffective activity.
This is why government is often ineffective, and why both left and right wing parties want to streamline it.
Re: (Score:2)
This is why government is often ineffective, and why both left and right wing parties want to streamline it.
You had me up until that last part. Unless you mean "steamline" as in, give the contracts to their friends and campaign contributers instead of whoever has it now.
Really a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
My impression is that in most cases, consolidation can reduce apparent IT costs, but produces a not just centralized computers but a centralized bureaucracy.
And when you have a centralized bureaucracy, the individual agencies will be subject to data centers that act on their "requests" more slowly if at all. (Note that when you lose control over your data center, what used to be an order now becomes a request.)
In general, it seems like centralizing things can help with some issues, but creates a boatload of other issues.
The other 1000 Datacenters were found... (Score:2)
Seriously, how could the US Government NOT know about or keep track of their own infrastructure and resources???
Redundancy (Score:2)
They should've asked the Chinese straight away (Score:4, Funny)
They should've asked the Chinese straight away. They would have known.
Re: (Score:2)
Terrorists (Score:2)
Sure makes it hard for terrorists to target key data centers if the government doesn't even know how many they have or where they are.
Obama is just playing right into the hands of the terrorists...
1000 more datacenters? (Score:4, Informative)
"data center" (Score:2)
Remember that their definition of "data center" is more than a little self-serving, it can include any re-purposed office closet or "server room" in any of the tens of thousands of government offices in the thousands of government buildings.
Want to get rid of data centers? Add walls. (Score:2)
The requirement for "data center" is 500 sq. feet. So all they need to do is cut them into smaller blocks (eg, shipping containers, or just moving the walls), and suddenly, although it's now more "data centers" each one won't qualify, and so will reduce the count.
Or, we change the usage of the rooms -- that stack of cases of paper in the corner? That room's no longer 'devoted to data processing', and therefore, not a 'data center'. We already store spare parts in our 'not a data center' (also, my boss's
"What is a datacenter?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Before everyone gets all spun up on government waste, inefficiency, etc - I'd like to point out that numbers like these are never accurate. (For the record, I work for the feds, in the IT field).
The problem with "The feds have X datacenters" as a metric is that various audits occur at different times and by different auditors. These auditors almost always have differing definitions for what a datacenter actually is.
In one audit, a group can come through and define "Datacenter" as a big room where servers are co-located and services run on behalf of others. They'll find 2 at my center. Then a year later, a different group comes in and defines "Datacenter" as anywhere that more than 5 computers are running and left on all night. They'll find 200 at my center. Yes, this actually happened! The auditors came through dozens of science labs, found project servers sitting in the labs, and labeled each lab a datacenter.
Now here is the trick to why the statistics are complete mush. A normal IT guy would walk through the lab and say "Hey, that server should be in a datacenter!" -- but the auditors make the reverse conclusion. "Hey, this lab is a datacenter".
Yes, there is waste in the federal sphere and we absolutely need to take action to be more efficient at all levels. However, this article is basically pushing a number that came from someones' imagination, and pretending it's meaningful.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People don't generally insist on waxing their own floors or doing their own wiring, after all.
Because by and large the central cleaning do a good job and keep out of everyones way.
Often there are poor accounting systems that layer unreasonable costs on putting something in a data center, which obviously is an accounting problem.
Even if false costs and unnessacery beuracracy were eliminated there are a lot of costs to moving a server from a lab to a datacenter, a few that spring to mind.
1: Backed up datacent
Not datacenters, or server rooms, but "labs" (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a real problem with this analysis, esp. when you start defining what I'd call server rooms, things at 500'sq, as datacenters. We've got two large rooms, one probably bordering on that 500 ft, and no, you *cannot* "consolidate" that into a large one, for a number of reasons... like purpose and usage. If you're doing ordinary services, yeah (assuming you can trust them to keep them working, as opposed to the Department-wide login that just went down two days in a row - test boxes? h/a failover fallback? Huh?), but for special purposes - high performance computing, doing research, or some things I'm sure the military uses - there's no way to consolidate. You'd get long lines waiting for time on the systems, when the users are doing something so intensive that on small clusters they take *days* to run.
You just can't lump it all with dumb, large boxes.
mark
ObDisclaimer: I work for a federal contractor, on site.
Obligatory quote... (Score:2)