Why the US Government has so many data centers

Mon Mar 14 17:01:07 UTC 2016

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Lee <ler762 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Yes, *sigh*, another what kind of people _do_ we have running the govt
> story.  Altho, looking on the bright side, it could have been much
> worse than a final summing up of "With the current closing having been
> reported to have saved over $2.5 billion it is clear that inroads are
> being made, but ... one has to wonder exactly how effective the
> initiative will be at achieving a more effective and efficient use of
> government monies in providing technology services."
>
> Best Regards,
> Lee
>

That's an inaccurate cost savings though most likely; it probably doesn't
take into account the impacts of the consolidation on other items. As a
personal example, we're in the middle of upgrading my site from an OC-3 to
an OC-12, because we're running routinely at 95+% utilization on the OC-3
with 4,000+ seats at the site. The reason we're running that high is
because several years ago, they "consolidated" our file storage, so instead
of file storage (and, actually, dot1x authentication though that's
relatively minor) being local, everyone has to hit a datacenter some 500+
miles away over that OC-3 every time they have to access a file share. And
since they're supposed to save everything to their personal share drive
instead of the actual machine they're sitting at, the results are
predictable.

So how much is it going to cost for the OC-12 over the OC-3 annually? Is
that difference higher or lower than the cost to run a couple of storage
servers on-site? I don't know the math personally, but I do know that if we
had storage (and RADIUS auth and hell, even a shell server) on site, we
wouldn't be needing to upgrade to an OC-12.