[LINK] Blade servers solve space dilemma

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:01 AM 12/02/2009, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>Tom Worthington wrote:
> > ... Australian Arms (aka Commonwealth Crest)
> > <http://www.tomw.net.au/2003/epolicy.html#edocs> ...
> > If this and similar images were optimized, this should reduce computer
> > requirements significantly.
>
>Tom, It would seem that you are using a few web page/document issues and
>extrapolating to all of the government's IT usage. ...

Yes. I don't have access to internal government data and so only have 
public web pages and documents sent to me to go on. But I suspect 
e-documents are increasing more rapidly in organisations than 
traditional datasets.

>According to the Gershon report the government only spends 
>$80million  per year on websites. It could shut down all its 
>internet infrastructure and hardly impact IT usage at all. ...

Yes, web sites are an example of cheap infrastructure because they 
use standardised software. But I suspect that the cost of web sites 
is much higher than estimated by Gershon, as much of the 
infrastructure would be shared with other agency systems and not 
attributed to the web sites. Also agencies are likely to be far more 
reliant on this infrastructure than they realize.

But some of the e-documents I was referring to are copies of letters 
and remittance advices sent to me, not publicly released documents.

>There is no way you could achieve anything like a factor of 10 in
>application optimisation of FMIS, HR and OLTP systems. ...

I recall getting an remittance advice generated by an agency 
financial system, which had a blurry copy of the commonwealth arms in 
the corner. This was in an inefficiently formatted PDF file emailed 
to my company. The resulting document was about 100 times larger than 
it needed to be. Generating and sending this useless data may be 
consuming more system resources than running the financial system. If 
copies of all those documents are kept, it would be consuming more 
space than the financial records.

>The amount of data in these systems is expected to grow and the 
>government is always
>adding to their functionality via new legislation. ...

I am suggesting the amount of storage would drop if the data was 
efficiently encoded and unnecessary operations not performed. As an 
example there is no requirement for routine government documents to 
have logos of any sort on them, or to use fancy fonts, making the 
documents a fraction of the size. Those documents which need a logo 
can share one copy. Documents can use standard fonts and not include 
custom ones.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University