[188232] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Why the US Government has so many data centers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (amuse)
Sat Mar 12 14:25:58 2016
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.20.1603111156590.46772@cnex.qbaryna.pbz>
From: amuse <nanog-amuse@foofus.com>
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2016 15:44:49 -0800
To: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
I can confirm this. I was working at NASA when the last "data call" was put
out. We had a room with a flight simulator in it, powered by an SGI
Onyx2. The conversation with the auditor went like this:
Auditor *points at Onyx2* "Is that machine shared?"
Me: "Well yeah, the whole group uses it to..."
Auditor: *aside, to colleague* "OK, mark this room down too."
And our flight simulator lab became a data center.
On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
> If you've wondered why the U.S. Government has so many data centers, ok I
> know no one has ever asked.
>
> The U.S. Government has an odd defintion of what is a data center, which
> ends up with a lot of things no rational person would call a data center.
>
> If you call every room with even one server a "data center," you'll end up
> with tens of thousands of rooms now data centers. With this defintiion, I
> probably have two data centers in my home. Its important because
> Inspectors General auditors will go around and count things, because that's
> what they do, and write reports about insane numbers of data centers.
>
>
> https://datacenters.cio.gov/optimization/
>
> "For the purposes of this memorandum, rooms with at least one server,
> providing services (whether in a production, test, stage, development, or
> any other environment), are considered data centers. However, rooms
> containing only routing equipment, switches, security devices (such as
> firewalls), or other telecommunications components shall not be considered
> data centers."
>
