Why the US Government has so many data centers

George Metz george.metz at gmail.com
Mon Mar 14 19:19:50 UTC 2016


Datacenter isn't actually an issue since there's room in the same racks
(ironically, in the location the previous fileservers were) as the Domain
Controllers and WAN Accelerators. Based on the "standard" (per the Windows
admins) file storage space of 700 meg, that sounds like 3TB for user
storage. Even if it were 30TB, I still can't see a proper setup costing
more than the OC-12 after a period of two years.

Org is within the Federal Government, so they're not allowed to buy
non-top-line anything. I agree we should check how much bandwidth is
storage, but since there's a snowball's chance in hell of them actually
making a change, it's almost certainly not worth the paperwork.

On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 1:28 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> 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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