If the Social Security Administration's data center -- which stores 450 million earnings and benefits records -- suddenly crashed, the agency's operations would come to a near standstill for seven days, a top agency official told a House panel on Wednesday.
It would take SSA a week to transfer computer tapes to a commercial backup computer facility to recover the data, which the agency uses to issue Social Security numbers and administer benefits, Michael Gallagher, SSA deputy commissioner for budget, finance and management, told the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. ...
SSA started building its own secondary data center in Research Triangle Park, N.C., in May. That center stores 400 million medical records used to issue electronic disability claims and also provides redundant connections to SSA offices nationwide, including providing them with Internet access.
But the North Carolina facility will not become fully functional until 2012 ...While the agency works on a backup data center, officials are considering how to replace their primary data center, the 39-year-old National Computer Center at SSA's headquarters in Woodlawn, Md..
The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided $500 million for the new data center, the largest single federal building project funded by the stimulus bill. SSA and the General Services Administration are conducting a search for a new site within 40 miles of the headquarters facility.
Building the data center on a site off the Woodlawn campus would be cheaper than building a new center on site, according to a Booz Allen Hamilton study released in February. Building a new center off campus would cost $748 million compared with $803 million on campus, O'Carroll said. ...
Rob Hewell, regional commissioner for the Public Buildings Service's Mid-Atlantic Region at GSA, told lawmakers the agency has looked at more than 150 potential sites for the data center and plans to purchase one in March 2009.
Dec 17, 2009
Replacing National Computer Center
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4 comments:
If SSA were to shut down completely for a week, it would hardly be noticeable. Appointment availability is at least two to three weeks out in most offices, people can't get through the phones, cases are months or years being processed. When I go on Christmas vacation, I will be gone for 12 days, and there is absolutely no one to back me up--my cases will sit untouched and just get older. Seven days is nothing.
What an ego centric view. There are lots of processes that happen besides claims; data coming in and going out around the clock and the world and if SSA were closed to that degree the impact would be real in every state and in numerous federal agencies and data they expect to do their jobs is missing.
The new computer center needs to be built in Pennsylvania, not congested Maryland.
anon # 2--really?--So the claims that SSA takes(previously known as its primary responsibility)--now take a back seat to all of the glitzy cyberdata flow that just must not stop or everything will come crashing down? Well, it is not egocentric, more like FO-centric--you know, the trenches, where all the real work gets done. If SSA's computers go down, we would just do everything on paper until they came up again, then load it all in. Of course, there would be more delays and backlogs, but, again, who would notice the difference?
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