Why the US Government has so many data centers

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

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."