US Government Data Center Consolidation Behind Schedule, Cost Savings Uncertain 95
itwbennett writes "The goal of saving $3 billion by closing 1253 data centers is 'very realistic,' says David Powner, director of IT management issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office — except that agencies haven't been able to track cost savings for the initiative. Eighteen months from the 2015 deadline, 'we have no idea how much we've saved the taxpayers,' said Steve O'Keeffe, founder of MeriTalk, an online community for government IT issues. This isn't the first snag in the project. Almost a year ago, Slashdot reported that the project was woefully behind schedule."
The government released a summary of what data they do have (PDF), and at least the DoD expects to save $575 million next fiscal year. Also see the full GAO report.
!able, unwilling (Score:1)
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i worked for an DoD agency 13 years ago for a year. We had a main NT domain with a child domain for each of the 6 regional offices
the admin in one of the offices refused to set up a trust between his domain and the main domain. for some reason no one could make him do it. i bet same here. some of the admins in the smaller offices are refusing to go along with this
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Re:!able, unwilling (Score:4, Informative)
I'm (sorta) one of those admins.
It's not that local sites are refusing to go along with the data center consolidation, as we have to justify anything that stays here instead of moving to the data center 400 miles away, it's that in a lot of cases the data center people are saying, "You have to move", and then not understanding the reasons why we can't.
Whether or not this lack of understanding is deliberate or not, I'm not sure. We lowered our explanation to about a 6th grade comprehension level, and they finally seemed to get it, at least while they were on site.
Stuff like:
"These are the daily and weekly tasks we must perform with this system - you will have to sign an MOU/MOA (Memorandum of Understanding/Agreement) where you will accomplish these tasks how we tell you to." (Often, they didn't have the trained personnel to do it.)
"You will have to provide 24/7/365 uptime, with at least three 9s reliability (yes, I know that's low, but we couldn't justify higher), including the ability to do file level restoration." (They really balked at the file level restoration.)
"You have to have trained support personnel with OS experience." Their response was, "We can upgrade that to ." Our rebuttal, "No you can't, it has to stay in that exact configuration until changes are tested and approved by Echelon II."
We got to keep most of our stuff, at least so far.
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The problem is proving that the total actual savings are in alignment, requiring cooperation between a number of different departments. If the program is optimized to maximize ROI (which they never are), you target avoided capital expenditures first by consolidating into sites with available capacity, and onto existing systems with available processing/storage from sites that require major infrastructure upgrades. One trigger is often battery replacement, and you use the opportunity to move towards a bett
If you have to ask.... (Score:2)
The answer is probably "0"
It's in the name (Score:2, Funny)
surprise surprise (Score:3, Funny)
"we know we told you this project would save you 3 billion but we made an error"
what was the error?
"well we meant to say cost, not save. this change will cost you 3 billion"
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Ever notice how easy it is to spend other peoples money? they have no real reason to try and save that 3 billion because its not from their pockets. just raise taxes again and it will all be ok. In the end this will probably be like everything else
"we know we told you this project would save you 3 billion but we made an error"
what was the error?
"well we meant to say cost, not save. this change will cost you 3 billion"
savings would mean that some people would be making themselves redundant. so what to do? fire half the people in the projects randomly in advance. sounds stupid, but works.
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I swear someone is going out of their way to down mod my posts recently. how is this troll??
If I had to guess:
Because it dramatically simplifies a situation, represents a sarcastically presented political position rather than a cogent point, and fails to delivery an adequate punchline for its overly politicized setup.
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So. If we take your explanation at face value.
The GP was not a troll.
So the problem here is that you do not know what a troll is. Let me help.
An Internet Troll [wikipedia.org]
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Eh, inflammatory matches what I said to a reasonable degree. Sure, it matches slashdot's definition of flamebait better, but that mod is basically the forgotten step-child of the slashdot moderating world. Overrated gets more play.
Also the bizarre meta-modding through modding my post is weird. I was honestly just trying to inform the GP of what aspects he could address if he wanted the mods to be less severe in the future. Answering a query about the motives of others isn't substantiating them.
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Bullshit, and a big-ole steaming pile of it. Many times /. moderation is not about really marking people as Trolls or Flame baiting. It's about people that don't like your opinion so mod you something to make you invisible, reduce your karma, and make you stop posting. The persons post was not flame bait by anyone's definition, nor was it a troll.
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It's just basic economics. When you aren't spending your own money, you aren't incentivized to control costs.
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I didn't say every single person will try to spend as much as possible when they don't have to pay the bill. I said they aren't incentivized to control spending. That's true.
Whatever the government does, it does poorly... (Score:3, Insightful)
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You know, I'm thankful for all those long-running political debates that were easily settled with a single sentence of hyperbole, like ...
um...
I'm sure it's happened lots.
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Healthcare in America is 5 times more expensive for half the benefit compared to other countries with socialized medicine. At current rates, sometime in the next few decades it will pose an existential crisis for America because it will consume a larger portion of our GDP than any other area of the economy. The majority of people will no longer be able to access healthcare at all, illness and disease will sap our productivity and we will return to a third world country where the average lifespan is 30 or 40
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And it isn't like we don't have thousands of examples of the gov't successful management either.
Um. Ok. So list 50.
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Only the failures make the news. Things going normally are not news worthy.
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Only the failures make the news. Things going normally are not news worthy.
Well, that did not prevent you from claiming, there are "thousands" of successes... But then you get called on it and can not name even a handful... Maybe, there really aren't (that m)any?
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As a non-canadian, you didn't qualify for coverage of your healthcare in Canada. Funny how that works when people from south of the border come north looking for jobs.
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Sadly, the healthcare market in the US has not been free since the 1940-ies. During the War the government sought to limit workers' salaries, so, to attract talent, employers started offering "benefits" — like health insurance. This separated payers for health-care from the consumers of it — triggering the spiraling costs as the patients demanded the very best, while blaming the
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Imagine the death rate of members of the party not in control of the IPAB just before a big election.
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A healthcare system where the user pays no marginal cost for services will create nearly infinite demand for services. Government cannot possibly pay for this. Therefore, services must be rationed and limited to constrain costs. Yes, "death panel" is emotional rhetoric, but it has an element of accuracy. In a government-run healthcare system, bureaucrats will inevitably be making life and death decisions.
The benefits of socialized medicine are that everyone has access to services at no marginal cost, th
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If you have a contract with an insurance company which covers specified services, actuaries might determine the premiums, but I don't see how they would make life and death decisions. A service is covered, or it isn't.
"can you point to an example where a free market has increased the life span in a country? "
That could be the subject of a doctoral thesis. Lifespan is easily quantified, but if lifespan = f (x, y, z ... fm) how do you quantify 'fm'? Is the invention of antibiotics and vaccines market-drive
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Yes and no. See, I am very interested in what will happen if / when socialized medicine manages to make its full debut in the US.
Why, you ask? Well, there has been a long-standing argument about whether or not the US medical patient has been subsidizing the developmental costs of those drugs...and whether the rest of the world's citizenry has gotten to ride for free as a result. On one hand, you have the pharms, who have political lobbyists, IP trickery, loads of scams, but occasionally some novel drugs com
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I've been interested in that question myself. The reality will likely be somewhere in-between. The pharmaceutical companies probably will find some way to cope, quite probably with government aid. How that aid adds to the behind the scenes costs of socialized medicine would be another question.
Certainly, someone is either not telling the whole truth, or at least, has a serious misperception. The ability of other governments to negotiate lower prices may actually represent the fact that actually "produci
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"...enormous failure of the "free market" solution to a social issue of health care"
It never ceases to amaze me that we can have a situation where the big government "solution" has been an utter and complete catastrophe, but the government worshipers INSIST that the evil "free market" is the problem.
Government implemented Medicare. They implemented Medicaid. They ordered hospitals to treat everyone at the ER regardless of whether or not they could pay. They mandate what services insurance policies must c
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we ought to be shrinking [the government], rather than continue its expansion to the new domains (like, uh, healthcare)...
Right, because it's impossible for government to handle health insurance well. Ignore Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and virtually every other developed country in the world whose governments handle than it better than our system, because they must be outliers, and it defies your version of "common sense" (which trumps real world data) and uh, oh yeah, you're ideologically indisposed to face reality. While you're at it, ignore our own limited socialized health insurance (aka Medicare) because it, uh, has
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Then by all means, please move to where you believe the health care system is better. Nobody is saying you have to stay here and ruin the current system.
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"we're going to drag you kicking and screaming in to the future"
"you're too stupid to do so yourself."
You arbitrarily assert your intellectual superiority and thus decide that you're going to steal my wealth and coerce my behavior under threat of violence? For my own good?
"We're liberals."
Oh really? Never would have guessed.
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Didn't your parents explain to you that violence is only justified in response to aggression? I thought liberals were peaceful people? What justification do you have for imposing your beliefs on others with threats of violence? Having delusions about the superiority of your intelligence doesn't qualify.
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Point taken. I momentarily forgot that the discussion was being observed by third parties. I'll keep that in mind.
I don't think a rational argument works with a person who has openly stated their intent to impose their will on you under the threat of violence which they claim is justified on the basis of their superior intelligence.
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Then by all means, please move to where you believe the health care system is better.
Let me translate:
America, love it or leave it
Very retro. I think I just saw Richard Nixon and Abbie Hoffman strolling by.
Of course that attitude is a great American tradition. It's entirely reasonable to say that I should leave the country where I was born, have lived my whole life, and am a citizen of by virtue of the Fourteenth Amendment, because I think it's desirable to change some particular aspect. Many famous Americans have avoided discord by offering and following that advice, from George Washington to Susan B. Anthony to Ma
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"Fallacy of excluded middle". I did not say it is "impossible". It is possible — and is, indeed, done in all the places you list. But it is done poorly in all of those places.
Free market is the most efficient thing humanity has come up with. Our problem was that this particular market was not at all free — not for decades... Instead of freeing it, Obamacare made
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Obama and the Democrats did what was politically possible. The public option would have been too politically unpalatable for the most conservative Democrats. Under the rules, they needed every single Democrat; no Republican would have given serious consideration to any plan, even the one that is actually substantially similar to their own (and could have been even more similar if they'd participated in the development of it).
In hindsight, they might as well have gone for a public option: most of the conserv
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Obama and the Democrats did what was politically possible.
No. It'd be one thing if Obama had tried and failed, but he didn't even try. He's notorious for first compromising with himself then using that as a starting point for negotiations. Any kid knows that's not the way you bargain. Not that I think Obama doesn't know how to be persuasive. He learned politics in Chicago, where you're not twisting somebody's arm enough until you break it. Obama is very good at playing hardball, but only does it for things he actually cares about. The premature "compromises" and e
Re:Whatever the government does, it does poorly... (Score:4, Interesting)
Medicare is "cheaper"? Yeah, because government fixes the prices they pay. Nothing is "free". Government stiffs the hospital by price fixing Medicaid/Medicare services, so hospitals just shift that cost onto everyone else, especially the uninsured.
Government forces hospitals to treat people at emergency rooms regardless of their willingness or ability to pay, but does not fund this mandate, so that also translates into higher bills for everyone else. Government bans re-importation of prescription drugs & medical devices, thus forcing Americans to subsidize R&D for the rest of the world and guarantee profits for big pharma.
With all of this cost shifting, retail prices are insanely expensive, so people are compelled to buy insurance. There's how your worthless middle man enters the picture, and now you MUST buy his product or the IRS will be after you.
Government has been heavily involved in the healthcare system for 50 years. What's the result? Costs have exploded, millions are unable to afford basic services, quality of service is poor for the price paid, etc. etc. Yet people think that even more government is the "solution"? That's how Einstein defined "insanity".
Eliminating a middle man would reduce costs. Competition and innovation would also drive down costs and increase quality. Government price controls and mandates do exactly the opposite.
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We should shrink the FEDERAL government. It's up to people to decide what sort of government (if any) that they want, but even if you believe in a huge role for government it should be created in a "bottom up" fashion. Perform as many services as possible at the local or country level, do some at the state level and only as an absolute last resort, give the central government power.
This country is F*&^%$ up because we have a bunch of A$$#0!z in Washington D.C. trying to micro-manage the lives of 330 m
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Except that local governments tend to be corrupt, and get more corrupt the more 'local' they get. It's easy for money to buy a county or a state, harder to buy all the states. "Local" also has the problem of creating stratification. Poor areas will get poor service because there is little money available for services, and those areas are likely to get more poor as a result. Those poor areas drag down the rest of the country because the country is an open system Unless you fence them in, violate their human
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We should cut all of them. The problem is that no one in power wants to cut any of them.
That is why you resist giving those same people more stuff that they will have to manage in the future, because even if they had the courage to do it, their own constituents won't let them make meaningful reform when the time comes. The only "reform" they will accept are unfunded mandates (which leaves the costs on the private entities to pass on), or more services to band-aid the ones we have now.
The one thing people
Save now vs. over time (Score:5, Insightful)
How much have they saved now? Probably not much, and probably spent more.
It costs money to find the location, arrange the contracts, hire new people/lay off or move staff, and move equipment between rooms. Even then, many organizations may say it's cheaper to buy new hardware than it is to move 5+ year old servers.
However, the efficiency once many of those data centers is closed will become apparent. Space/power/cooling/networking/staff isn't cheap. Consolidating will give you some amazing savings a few years in.
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Most likely they can't say how much they saved because the previous accounting of the cost of those numerous data centers was sporadic at best. You can't know how much you saved if you don't know how much it cost to run what you replaced.
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...until you find you have all this orphaned equipment that nobody actually knows what it does in 5 years.
US Budget Deficit Shrinks Far Faster Than Expected (Score:1)
Maybe we should slow down with the deficit reductions; [cnbc.com] this consolodation may not be necessary and may be detrimental.
A Sign of the Times (Score:5, Insightful)
You know you're in trouble when they speak of how much money they're saving instead of how much they spent to acquire a feature or benefit. What about the data center that stores every digital interaction in America? I bet that costs a pretty penny to operate, let's shut it down, it's not doing us any good. Didn't stop the Boston Bombing... Hell, zoning laws could have prevented the recent explosion in West, TX (which was more harmful than the Boston bombs), but I don't see them trying to save anything at all anywhere -- Not even lives.
"Honey, look what I got, you wouldn't believe how much money I saved today!" -- No. She spent money, didn't "save" a dime. I'll evaluate cost to benefit ratio to determine if the purchases were wise.
Want to save money? Why not get rid of the DHS? They're not needed. We have FBI and cops already. We don't need a huge cumbersome annoying workforce of security guards who don't actually provide security. You Can't Provide Security for others -- They can only protect themselves, and should be aware of surroundings and cautious of dangers if need be; That saves money and lives.
How much of the money they're spending on 3rd party contractors is wasted by inflating the costs to turn a profit? I'm not stupid. They haven't saved a dime one.
This isn't news. (Score:1)
Government program behind schedule and over budget exactly according to plan.
some of us saw this coming (Score:2)
Some of us saw this coming since the day it was announced.
a) This is big government we're talking about. We're lucky the costs aren't higher.
b) Since when has anything orchestrated by this administration been anything but the opposite of what claimed?
c) We're lucky they're actually telling us at this point.
To quote John Glenn (Score:2)
They need another datacenter (Score:3)
They need another datacenter to hold the computers that track the cost savings from the other datacenters.
Two things are certain. (Score:2)
Hovernment does not know how to budget and Software is always behind schedule.
Put the two toigether and you'll not have any savings at all but a growing cost.
Been there before (Score:2)
Data center consolidations are never easy, and this is most likely being handled by a for-profit contractor, so tack on an extra 20% to whatever price tag it is, just for overhead.
Think of all the stuff that has to happen:
- All the connectivity to various networks has to be moved or duplicated. If we're not talking IPsec over the Internet, that means circuit orders, routing changes, etc. which quickly multiply and all involve tons of coordination.
- If you're doing P2V, that has to be carefully scheduled and
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New data center... heh! (Score:2)
A few years ago, we got a "new" data center. I was all excited to move our old and busted applications at least off of old an busted hardware!
However what we got was a new building.
Rather than getting new servers, what we actually got was a few days of downtime while they unplugged and loaded it all on a truck and drove our busted hardware to the new building! Progress!
When I was told, I had one of those laughs... Although all I could think of was what would happen if the semi truck carrying all our stuff c
Inside the DoD (Score:2)
Of course, being that the consolidation is mostly-complete in my Theatre, its too late go gather any real data. Most likely, Brigades will simply make estimates based on the number of servers