Why the US Government has so many data centers

Fri Mar 11 21:07:37 UTC 2016

This is a great way to create a mess of rules. Need a server for running an app locally to a site? You need XYZ standards that make no sense for your deploy and increase the cost by 10 times. 

Our server guys always try to set standards, then they run into a deploy where the needs are simple, but the standards make it significantly uneconomical.

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Sean Donelan
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2016 1:55 PM
To: Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists at gmail.com>
Cc: nanog list <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Why the US Government has so many data centers

On Fri, 11 Mar 2016, Christopher Morrow wrote:
>  o 'a machine under your desk' is not a production operation.
>     (if you think it is, please stop, think again and move that 
> service to conditioned power/cooling/ethernet)

Even worse, the new OMB data center definition wants says "(whether in a production, test, stage, development, or any other environment)".

In the non-government world, you want to keep test, staging and development separate from your "production."  So your testing lab is now a "data center," and you must consolidate your "data centers"
together.

If you are optimizing servers, not data centers, then you probably want to consolidate your production servers in a data center.  But there will still be lots of servers not in data centers, like the server in the parking garage that controls the gates or the server in the building that controls HVAC.  Its not smart to consolidate your HVAC servers and your credit card servers, as some companies have found out.

The U.S. government definition of data center is a bit like defining a warehouse as any room containing a single ream of paper.  Yes, warehouses are used to store reams of paper; but that doesn't make every place containing a ream of paper a warehouse.