Comments on: 4.3. The Data Centre Strategy

By: John

John — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:20:57 +0000

“…the new ICT infrastructure will be more resilient, will have significantly reduced reliability,”

…No truer words were ever spoken

By: John

John — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:12:10 +0000

Rationalisation of the numerous public sector datacenters will provide substantial cost savings, providing the resources of the datacenter are commodity based systems, where different departments or government bodies rent time/space on a common platform based in strategically placed datacenters. So often we see local authorities purchasing additional SAN’s and servers to see a different department has significant over capacity, through to the worst cases of excess where the NHS (NPFiT) Program has mandated that NHS trusts purchase new servers and SAN’s from a mandated provider when they already have systems with spare capacity that is more than capable of running the new applications.

Now if we take all the spare capacity that is sitting in local datacenters from all the different local authorities, regional authorities, NHS trusts and Government departments that is a significant amount of servers and storage utilizing power, cooling and generating heat and adding to our overall emissions output which could quite easily be utilized by other departments. So yes there will be environmental savings by rationalizing over capacity.

But these cost savings can only be realized when common sense prevails and the government CIO mandates common platforms and common architectures between government departments and adherence to standards based computing models. With regional datacenters providing commodity based server, storage and networking platforms.

By: William H

William H — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:24:33 +0000

Well, it’s regrettable you’re using too much power and spending too much money (despite being the envy of the world etc). Please get your act together asap. We pay too much tax, and there’s only one planet.

However, this does sound like an Intellect scheme to consolidate IT spend with a narrower base of suppliers. I’d want to see really careful evaluation of the alternatives.

Also – this idea of forcing the entire public sector to use Whitehall data centres makes me uneasy. Why would Whitehall data centres be better than – say – Amazon data centres or data centres operated by cloud service providers who are good at what they do?

By: Prof. Marcus Xaesar

Prof. Marcus Xaesar — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:50:32 +0000

Mitsubishi VS Cisco

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:51:21 +0000

It’s well known that if you put 10 computers in one room they use less power than if they were in 10 different rooms. Oh, no, hang on, that’s drivel.

One thing they did get right though “…the new ICT infrastructure will be more resilient, will have significantly reduced reliability, …”. Significantly reduced reliability sounds about right.

By: KWL

KWL — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:03:01 +0000

Is it me or has someone managed to shoehorn in enviromental policy buzzwords into a page about data storage and collection?

By: Andrew K

Andrew K — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:17:49 +0000

“Public servants will be able to store their data in the knowledge that it is secure, accessible and sustainable.”???

They omitted “vibrant” and “diverse”.

What precisely is this page saying? Condensing it down and cutting out the platitudes, it seems to say that they are centralising ALL public sector data storage under one organisation.