Why the US Government has so many data centers

George Herbert george.herbert at gmail.com
Mon Mar 14 17:28:30 UTC 2016


At enterprise storage costs, that much storage will cost more than the OC-12, and then add datacenter and backups.  Total could be 2-3x OC-12 annual costs.

If your org can afford to buy non-top-line storage then it would probably be cheaper to go local.

However, you should check how much of the bandwidth is actually storage.  I see multimillion dollar projects without basic demand / needs analysis or statistics more often than not.


George William Herbert
Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 14, 2016, at 10:01 AM, George Metz <george.metz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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.



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