History of Federal Data Centers

A HISTORY OF FEDERAL DATA CENTERS <--- From Mainframes To The Cloud --> 2.900 TODAY, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS HOME TO DATA CENTERS 1,200 WHY? 30% IN 2010, NUMBER OF DATA CENTERS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PLANS TO SHUTTER BY 2015, TO REDUCE REDUNDANT OPERATIONS, SAVE ON POWER PERCENTAGE OF THE $80.7 BILLION FEDERAL IT BUDGET WITH ALMOST 400 IN THE AND COOLING, AND REAP $3 BILLION IN DEFENSE DEPARTMENT BY THAT WENT TO DATA DECEMBER 2013 ALONE OVERALL SAVINGS CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE THE FIRST FEDERAL "DATA CENTERS" OPENED THEIR DOORS AS PUNCH CARD SHOPS MORE THAN 100 YEARS AGO .. THE PUNCH CARD AGE Tabulating Numbers 1890 The Census Bureau conducts the Decennial Census using Herman Hollerith's mechanical tabulator and finishes months ahead of schedule Hollerith's company eventually became IBM 1900-1950 Data centers spring up as agencies centralize punch card operations THE SUPERCOMPUTER AGE Automating Calculations 1946 The U.S. Army launches supercomputers with the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) 0090000 obo90on90 oo0o0oo $500,000 Cost of ENIAC (about $6 million today) poo oo0ole ooo00o booo700 4 MILLION TIMES FASTER Speed of the iPad 2 compared to ENIAC. The world's fastest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is 42 trillion times faster. 1952 Army follows ENIAC with the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) 30 17,300 EDVAC's weight in pounds People needed to operate EDVAC for an 8-hour shift THE MAINFRAME AGE Building Glass Houses 1951-54 The Census Bureau, Air Force, Army Map Service and Atomic Energy Commission adopt the Universal Automatic Computer I (UNIVAC I) UNIVAC I was the first computer to store data on magnetic tapes and was used to tabulate part of the 1950 Decennial Census: 1954 economic census the entire 1959-71 Reign of the IBM 1401 Data Processing System IBM becomes the first computer maker to sell 10,000 units 1970 ONWARD Mainframes provide backbone data-processing muscle in data centers across government 2012 NASA powers down its last mainframe, an IBM System z9 THE CLIENT/SERVER AGE Sharing the Workload . 1960 The CIA's Scientific Engineering Institute rolls out an early version of Digital Equipment Corp.'s PDP minicomputer, the PDP-3 1964 DEC unveils the first popular minicomputer server, the 12-bit PDP-8 The company's VAX machines will soon follow and proliferate across government 1965 NASA sends an IBM server into space aboard the Gemini, while five IBM mainframes at a NASA facility in Houston, Texas, perform 25 billion calculations every 24 hours for flight controllers 1985 One of the world's first notebook computers, the Grid Compass, is used by NASA on the Space Shuttle THE VIRTUALIZATION AGE Shrinking the Footprint 1996 More than 5 billion floppy disks have been sold worldwide 1.44 MEGABYTES Storage space on the most commonly used floppy disk is less than the size of 1 digital photograph 2001 VMware creates first x86 server virtualization product 2003 Johnson Space Center begins using VMware Workstation and GSX Server 2005 Microsoft launches Windows Server System virtualization program At the Food and Drug Administration, 6 VMware ESX hosts run more than 80 virtual machines 2006 The Marine Corps announces a plan to use server virtualization to reduce 12,000 physical servers to 100 mobile platforms 2008 Pentagon CIO reports that his staff will use virtualization to trim 1,000 servers to 239 THE CLOUD AGE Re-envisioning the Data Center 2009 The White House announces the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative and requires agencies to develop migration strategies • 2010 The Agriculture Department becomes the first cabinet-level agency to move email and collaboration to the cloud 120,000 users, spread across 21 platforms, migrate to cloud services 2010 The Office of Management and Budget issues the federal cloud-first policy, requiring agencies to consider cloud computing options for new IT needs $20 BILLION Amount of annual IT budget the White House estimates government could spend on the cloud 2011 The Homeland Security Department lays out a strategy for using 9 private-cloud services and 3 public-cloud services 2013 Since October, agencies have issued 95 cloud procurement solicitations (Fiscal 2013) The National Science Foundation awards $24.4 million contract to migrate its accounting system to the cloud. FEDTECH fedtechmagazine.com/datacenterhistory