US Federal Government to close 800 Data Centres

US federal government to close 800 data centers, walk into the cloud -- Engadget

It's started. Sanctioned at high levels the programme will commence and be aggressive. Discussions about the success of the move are moot. There will be two lists. List A will be the people required to make the move happen. Jobs there. List B will be the cull list, people that need to go to leverage the projected savings. Be on list A.

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Bl8ckr0uter

800 datacenters?!?! Really? Why do they have that many anyway?

bigmantenor

Someone in the comment section of that article was saying that the government classifies a "data center" as any site that hosts 3 or more servers... Don't know if that is accurate or not.

Kelkin

Skynet Is taking over!! It has begun!

xenodamus

bigmantenor wrote: »

Someone in the comment section of that article was saying that the government classifies a "data center" as any site that hosts 3 or more servers... Don't know if that is accurate or not.

What that guy was describing sounds like what's going on around here. I work for the Army Corps of Engineers and we've got around 50 districts worldwide that each have anywhere from 1-20 field offices. They are in the process of virtualizing the servers at all those field sites and bringing them into the district data centers. So, in our case at least, nothing is going into a public "cloud". They are just being virtualized and moved to another location.

This will end up costing some jobs at the local level, and creating a few at the district level most likely. Fortunately, I'm at one of the 2 mirrored national data centers, so our stuff isn't going anywhere.

NOC-Ninja

I guess tons of system admins will get laid off.

colemic

Interesting... but it will at least 3-5 years, if not more, to accomplish. It will be interesting to see how the smaller 'data centers' in the middle of nowhere, with crappy DSL-quality lines, will be able to function.

tpatt100

One of my contracts that was five years long was for migration consolidation, I think the idea started some time ago.

j_griffith

colemic wrote: »

Interesting... but it will at least 3-5 years, if not more, to accomplish. It will be interesting to see how the smaller 'data centers' in the middle of nowhere, with crappy DSL-quality lines, will be able to function.

I am betting that many will pay to have fibre to the DTE installed or will break lease to relocate to a facility that can support. The first solution will have the taxpayer fund the extending of bandwidth into currently under provisioned areas.

So my bet is on the relocation of offices closer to telephone Cable Offices (CO). But again it is only taxpayer's money.

Turgon

j_griffith wrote: »

I am betting that many will pay to have fibre to the DTE installed or will break lease to relocate to a facility that can support. The first solution will have the taxpayer fund the extending of bandwidth into currently under provisioned areas.

So my bet is on the relocation of offices closer to telephone Cable Offices (CO). But again it is only taxpayer's money.

Gotta love those taxpayers. Print more money, give it the banks and corporations and move the debt onto the people. How much is food and gas in the US these days?

Raidersfan81

Turgon wrote: »

Gotta love those taxpayers. Print more money, give it the banks and corporations and move the debt onto the people. How much is food and gas in the US these days?

A #7 at McDonalds supersized is $8.57 after tax and Gas is $3.80 a gallon here in California.

xenodamus

briandy81 wrote: »

A #7 at McDonalds supersized is $8.57 after tax and Gas is $3.80 a gallon here in California.

Either you had a receipt in your pocket, or you eat at McD's waaay too much.

veritas_libertas

Turgon wrote: »

Gotta love those taxpayers. Print more money, give it the banks and corporations and move the debt onto the people. How much is food and gas in the US these days?

Around $3.50 a gallon in my area of the country.

lordy

Less than 4 bucks a gallon? That's almost free.

For Germany right now it's:
1.55 EUR/liter * 1.40 $/EUR * 3.78 Gallons/liter = $8.20 per gallon

powerfool

I believe that the 800 data centers are just under half of them.

But, this comes the outgoing Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, who has a history of being surrounded by criminals. Who knows how things will change... perhaps more data centers will close, perhaps fewer. The logistics of closing data centers is a pretty big headache, especially for the Federal government. If they would use it as Phase 2 after they push through the virtualization initiative, it would be much easier... virtual servers move fairly easily.

powerfool

lordy wrote: »

Less than 4 bucks a gallon? That's almost free.

For Germany right now it's:
1.55 EUR/liter * 1.40 $/EUR * 3.78 Gallons/liter = $8.20 per gallon

I'd love to see how much of that is taxes, compared to the US. And I don't live in a world of relativity. $4/gal is high for the US, period. But, half of that increase is due to the decline in value of the US Dollar.

lordy

Before getting back to the original topic: The price I mentioned contains roughly 60% (!) taxes.

It's really a big question what counts as a datacenter. I don't think that we are talking about 800, 100.000 sqft full-blown datacenters. This number probably includes a lot of, possibly remote, small offices that are counted as datacenters because they have a rack of servers.

higherho

xenodamus wrote: »

What that guy was describing sounds like what's going on around here. I work for the Army Corps of Engineers and we've got around 50 districts worldwide that each have anywhere from 1-20 field offices. They are in the process of virtualizing the servers at all those field sites and bringing them into the district data centers. So, in our case at least, nothing is going into a public "cloud". They are just being virtualized and moved to another location.

This will end up costing some jobs at the local level, and creating a few at the district level most likely. Fortunately, I'm at one of the 2 mirrored national data centers, so our stuff isn't going anywhere.

yea most of the DOD is trying to go to the private DOD cloud and honestly its costing more money for certain services to be up in the cloud then having the systems at the local place. For us if we moved our servers and our test environment in the cloud it would cost millions.

higherho

lordy wrote: »

Less than 4 bucks a gallon? That's almost free.

For Germany right now it's:
1.55 EUR/liter * 1.40 $/EUR * 3.78 Gallons/liter = $8.20 per gallon

that may be true but statistics show that US uses more oil / fuel than any country in the world. So while you pay 8.20 per gallon I doubt you fill up as much as americans do.

skinsFan202

It's not really as bad as it sounds. Some of these places had already been in the process of closure at least two years ago. I see a few rooms I worked at on this list. A lot of these 'data centers' being referred to are nothing more than glorified network closets being consolidated into larger real data centers. This is more about saving on electricity costs than anything else. Sys admins aren't really losing their jobs, the few that do will probably be moved to a bigger data center or somewhere else.

afcyung

Turgon wrote: »

US federal government to close 800 data centers, walk into the cloud -- Engadget

It's started. Sanctioned at high levels the programme will commence and be aggressive. Discussions about the success of the move are moot. There will be two lists. List A will be the people required to make the move happen. Jobs there. List B will be the cull list, people that need to go to leverage the projected savings. Be on list A.

This has been in the works for years already. Every base/installation/globally separated unit has its own data center. They have been working for a long time to consolidate them.

Turgon

higherho wrote: »

that may be true but statistics show that US uses more oil / fuel than any country in the world. So while you pay 8.20 per gallon I doubt you fill up as much as americans do.

Im in the UK and fill up every week and spend well over 100 dollars on fuel.

Killermac

afcyung wrote: »

This has been in the works for years already. Every base/installation/globally separated unit has its own data center. They have been working for a long time to consolidate them.

Indeed but they way I feel about that is it makes targeting the areas to take out much easier. I mean if you know base X controls X areas and you take it out then control a certain section. Now yes they have redundant fail over sites but what if you know those also? We have many bases that are not around anymore and few and fewer bases in each state.

higherho

Turgon wrote: »

Im in the UK and fill up every week and spend well over 100 dollars on fuel.

ouch

Sorry to hear that.

never2late

Turgon wrote: »

Im in the UK and fill up every week and spend well over 100 dollars on fuel.

Wow! I spend about $60 every 10 days or so for fuel (3.65/gal) but limit my driving due to the price.

xenodamus

We're around $3.50/gal here in Mississippi, but driving 75 miles each way to work we still spend around $500/mo. on fuel as a household.