Why the US Government has so many data centers

Fri Mar 11 20:54:47 UTC 2016

On Fri, 11 Mar 2016, Christopher Morrow wrote:
>  o 'a machine under your desk' is not a production operation.
>     (if you think it is, please stop, think again and move that
> service to conditioned power/cooling/ethernet)

Even worse, the new OMB data center definition wants says "(whether in a 
production, test, stage, development, or any other environment)".

In the non-government world, you want to keep test, staging and 
development separate from your "production."  So your testing lab
is now a "data center," and you must consolidate your "data centers"
together.

If you are optimizing servers, not data centers, then you probably
want to consolidate your production servers in a data center.  But
there will still be lots of servers not in data centers, like the
server in the parking garage that controls the gates or the server
in the building that controls HVAC.  Its not smart to consolidate your
HVAC servers and your credit card servers, as some companies have
found out.

The U.S. government definition of data center is a bit like defining
a warehouse as any room containing a single ream of paper.  Yes, 
warehouses are used to store reams of paper; but that doesn't make
every place containing a ream of paper a warehouse.