Consequences - infrastructure
Fun times in Seattle -- from
Slashdot:
Seattle Forced to Shut Off City’s Data Center
On Aug. 23, Mayor Mike McGinn of Seattle informed residents that the city would partially shut down its municipal data center for five days including the Labor Day weekend. As a result, city residents will be unable to pay bills, apply for business licenses, or take advantage of other online services.
In a Webcast press conference, McGinn isolated the issue as a failure in one of the electrical “buses” that supplies power to the data center. Because that piece of equipment began overheating, the city had to begin taking servers and applications offline to prevent overloading the system. The maintenance will cost the city $2.1 million of its maintenance budget.
A second power bus will remain operational, supplying enough electricity to power redundant systems for critical life and fire safety systems, including 911 services and fire dispatch. The city’s Web sites should also be up and running in some capacity. A full list of affected services can be found here.
And the fun continues to the South -- again from
Slashdot:
Washington Looks to Unload Data Center
The state of Washington is hoping that a buyer will step in and lease or buy about 30,000 square feet worth of space in a state-built data center it now has no use for.
The $255 million site sits on Jefferson Street, a few blocks east of the state Capitol in Olympia, Wash., which state officials have promoted as being seismically inactive, and thus an ideal spot for a data center, according to local reports.
The problem? According to The News Tribune of Tacoma, Wash., a state-funded report by Excipio Consulting LLC (filed more than a year and a half ago) stated that the total of 50,000 square feet of data center space in the Department of Enterprise Services’ complex is perhaps 10 times what the state needed.
The Jefferson St. facility includes four “halls” for data center use. The state plans to use Hall 1, but also built out the related Hall 2, which it wants to lease. The two other halls haven’t been completed. The site, which includes 260,000 sq. ft. of total space, is shared between the state’s Department of Enterprise Services and its sister agency, Consolidated Technology Services.
The state hopes that the Hall 2 tenant will complete its infrastructure, leaving the state off the hook. “The way we’re hoping it would work—the best case scenario for us—is we would not have to make any additional investment in Hall 2,” Rob St. John, the CTS director, told the Tribune. “Actually what the market supports and what we can get in there, time will tell."
Of course, the requirements of the State will grow but, at the same time, the space required for a given computing and storage power will shrink.
Our tax dollars at work...
Posted by DaveH at August 24, 2012 8:10 PM