Why the US Government has so many data centers

Mon Mar 14 15:20:35 UTC 2016

On Mon, 14 Mar 2016, Lee wrote:
> I doubt anyone really believes that having a server in the room makes
> it a data center.  But if you're the Federal CIO pushing the cloud
> first policy, this seems like a great bureaucratic maneuver to get the
> decision making away from the techies that like redundant servers in
> multiple locations, their managers who's job rating depends on
> providing reliable services and even the agency CIOs.  Check the
> reporting section of the memo where it says "each agency head shall
> annually publish a Data Center Consolidation and Optimization
> Strategic Plan".   I dunno, but I'm guessing agency heads are
> political appointees that aren't going to spend much, if any, time
> listening to techies whine about how important their servers are & why
> they can't be consolidated, virtualized or outsourced.

If your goal is to consolidate servers, call it a server consolidation 
initiative.

You are correct political appointees won't understand why techies are
perplexed by calling everything a data center.  Just remember that
when you read the stories in the Washington Post about how many
data centers the government has...

http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/design-build/us-government-finds-2000-more-data-centers/95243.fullarticle
New count of government facilities, and it looks like consolidation is going backwards