Why the US Government has so many data centers

Fri Mar 11 23:44:49 UTC 2016

I can confirm this. I was working at NASA when the last "data call" was put
out.  We had a room with a flight simulator in it, powered by an SGI
Onyx2.  The conversation with the auditor went like this:

Auditor *points at Onyx2*  "Is that machine shared?"
Me:  "Well yeah, the whole group uses it to..."
Auditor: *aside, to colleague* "OK, mark this room down too."

And our flight simulator lab became a data center.

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:

> If you've wondered why the U.S. Government has so many data centers, ok I
> know no one has ever asked.
>
> The U.S. Government has an odd defintion of what is a data center, which
> ends up with a lot of things no rational person would call a data center.
>
> If you call every room with even one server a "data center," you'll end up
> with tens of thousands of rooms now data centers.  With this defintiion, I
> probably have two data centers in my home.  Its important because
> Inspectors General auditors will go around and count things, because that's
> what they do, and write reports about insane numbers of data centers.
>
>
> https://datacenters.cio.gov/optimization/
>
> "For the purposes of this memorandum, rooms with at least one server,
> providing services (whether in a production, test, stage, development, or
> any other environment), are considered data centers. However, rooms
> containing only routing equipment, switches, security devices (such as
> firewalls), or other telecommunications components shall not be considered
> data centers."
>