The federal government estimated it has nearly doubled the number of data centers it had in 2011, now totaling over 7,000.
As the Federal Times noted, the “Obama administration estimated the government had about 3,100 data centers” in June of 2011. In June of 2013, a “recount yielded more than 6,000. Now that number has grown again — to 7,145.” Lawmakers released those numbers on Thursday, and the Government Accountability Office confirmed the figures.
Rep. John Mica (R-FL), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Government Operations, said the government will never meet its goal of consolidating data centers at its current pace.
A government official said that the “number of data centers has grown because of changes in the counting methodology and because agencies discovered more data centers that had previously been unaccounted for.”
David Powner, the director of information technology management issues at GAO, agreed. “There are some fundamental questions about whether the government really knows what it has,” he said.
The federal government will have one more data center when it opens a massive NSA data storage facility in Utah this fall.
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