I can confirm this. I was working at NASA when the last "data call" was put out. We had a room with a flight simulator in it, powered by an SGI Onyx2. The conversation with the auditor went like this: Auditor *points at Onyx2* "Is that machine shared?" Me: "Well yeah, the whole group uses it to..." Auditor: *aside, to colleague* "OK, mark this room down too." And our flight simulator lab became a data center. On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
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."