Choosing the Right Cloud Services

Posted on December 5, 2011, 9:00 am, by David Blankenhorn and received No Comments ».

Each cloud service and delivery model is designed to meet specific business requirements.  Some offer greater cost savings, but may not provide the appropriate level of visibility and security.  Others may offer higher levels of security, but at the expense of elasticity and costs.  The key is to find the best fit for the business requirements and the IT service.

One method that may prove useful is a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA).  In its simplest form, an MCDA is a discipline used to help support the decision making process in the absence of hard measurements.  This method uses measurements based on the subjective strengths of various preferences.  By aligning the preferences to the various IT services and applying some if-then logic, it becomes clearer which services may most benefit from which types of cloud offerings. Continue reading this post »

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For Crying Out Cloud

Posted on December 2, 2011, 9:00 am, by Chris Thorne and received No Comments ».

Cloud computing and virtualization.

If you work within the federal, state and local, and higher education IT industries, you most likely have been exposed to these terms.  However, for some, understanding the distinction between the two can be a little confusing. This year at FOSE 2011, DLT Solutions and Quest Software helped visitors cut through the fog of uncertainty surrounding this issue.

During the event, DLT asked public-sector IT professionals to participate in a series of “Minute to Win It” style games to illustrate the complexities of cloud computing and virtualization. These games were designed to show participants that not everything is as simple as it looks which according to a Norwich University study*, proves that they are not alone. Continue reading this post »

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LiveUpdate Improvements in NBU 7.1

Posted on November 30, 2011, 9:00 am, by Juan Maldonado and received No Comments ».

LiveUpdate is a NetBackup feature that allows administrators to quickly and easily upgrade NetBackup clients under central control using a special NetBackup policy. Previous releases of NetBackup offered limited functionality for LiveUpdate, providing only the ability to upgrade to a minor update of the current version (e.g., from NetBackup 6.5.5 to 6.5.6). In contrast, NetBackup 7.1 has the ability to update a client even if it’s running a previous major version (NetBackup 6.5 and later). LiveUpdate operates with any supported NetBackup client system, including UNIX, Linux and Windows machines, and can update a mixture of UNIX, Linux and Windows clients from a single LiveUpdate policy.

It’s important to understand that NetBackup LiveUpdate is not the same as the LiveUpdate service that many other Symantec products use. The NetBackup version only runs when the administrator explicitly executes it and it does not pull data from Symantec or any other location on the Internet. All update information is contained on servers that are controlled by the NetBackup administrator. It’s also important to note that other installation methods are still supported; LiveUpdate is an optional tool. If administrators prefer to use the standard NetBackup client installation utilities, they may still do so. Continue reading this post »

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ONTAP 8 Cluster-mode: NetApp’s Dash of Special Sauce

Posted on November 28, 2011, 9:00 am, by Greg Agana and received No Comments ».


Photo courtesy of GastroChic.com

Way back in 2003, an eternity in tech years, Network Appliance purchased Spinnaker  Networks an appliance maker  that utilized SpinFS.  Since the acquisition NetApp , as it is now called, has developed two different operating system offerings a.k.a. their “special sauce.” The original ONTAP “flavor”   (ONTAP 8 7-mode) and the ONTAP 8 Cluster-mode, a reincarnate of technology acquired from Spinnaker and previously known as ONTAP GX.

As the world of computing, has changed over the years, we have lived through consolidation of server count and the increase in ease of management thanks to the virtualization craze, only to find out that our data did not stop growing.  In fact, with our connected world of emails, texts, apps, music, movies, status updates and Facebook photo albums with pictures of our exciting family vacation to a museum (all 200 of them); we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.  Per IBM, 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years! Continue reading this post »

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SCAP Frequently Asked Questions

Posted on November 21, 2011, 9:00 am, by Shamun Mahmud and received No Comments ».

In our last discussion, we aspired for automated provisioning and continuous monitoring of Network Security Management.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has spearheaded Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) efforts for the last ten years. NIST, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, was founded in 1901 as the nation’s first federal physical science research laboratory.  In essence, SCAP is a NIST-sponsored effort for both pieces (automated provisioning and continuous monitoring).

As a refresher: SCAP, pronounced “S-Cap”, combines a number of open standards that are used to enumerate software flaws and configuration issues related to security. They measure systems to find vulnerabilities and offer methods to score those findings in order to evaluate the possible impact. It is a method for using those open standards for automated vulnerability management, measurement and policy compliance evaluation and was the next logical step in the evolution of our compliance automation tools for Federal Agencies. SCAP defines how the following standards (referred to as SCAP ‘Components’) are combined and allows results to be easily shared for Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others. Continue reading this post »

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Upcoming Google Government Tech Day in Denver

Posted on November 17, 2011, 9:00 am, by Kristin Happe and received No Comments ».

On Thursday, November 17, Google and DLT Solutions are hosting a live technology seminar in Denver, Colorado.  The Tech Day will be held at the Sheraton Denver West Hotel in Lakewood, CO.

Government agencies around the country are rapidly adopting Google’s enterprise solutions to manage information & promote teamwork, while lowering their IT costs. Learn from Google product experts how these modern technology solutions allow you to meet the current challenges of your agency. You will see, in a briefing and in demonstration, today’s art of the possible and a compelling vision for the future! Continue reading this post »

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Federal Government: 24,000 Web Sites and Shrinking; A Four Point Web Optimization Plan

Posted on November 10, 2011, 9:00 am, by noel.carr and received No Comments ».

The below blog was written by Aaron Dun and published with permission from Percussion. Percussion provides Web Content Management (WCM) software that helps businesses increase traffic, drive conversion, and improve social interaction. The Percussion Marketing Blog discusses web content, engagement, SEO, inbound marketing, and social media.

In June President Obama took to the airwaves to announce an ambitious campaign to reduce waste. The Campaign to Cut Waste sought to identify pointless Federal spending and eliminate it as rapidly as possible. As of June, as much as $33B was estimated as potential savings. Continue reading this post »

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As in Nature, Clouds Come in many Shapes

Posted on November 9, 2011, 9:00 am, by David Blankenhorn and received No Comments ».

Cloud computing expands on the many existing choices that are already available to IT for the delivery of IT services. Currently, we have RISC, x86, ATOM and ARM processors. We have Windows, Linux, UNIX, and mainframe operating systems. We also have a number of choices for application servers, databases, and development languages. The good thing about having these choices is that it allows architects to pick the best fit (either client-server or mainframe platforms) for the delivery of IT services (applications).

Cloud computing is really no different. There are a number of different cloud services and delivery models, and each should be evaluated for a best fit for the targeted application. Different cloud services will cater to different security profiles, different developer environments, different levels of control, and different kinds of applications. Each cloud service model has different business and IT benefits and challenges. Continue reading this post »

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Join us as we Recognize the Winners of the First Ever Public Sector CAD Awards

Posted on November 8, 2011, 9:00 am, by noel.carr and received No Comments ».

Earlier this summer, [acronym] launched the first ever public sector CAD awards and now we’d like you to join us as we honor our finalists at the [acronym] Magazine Public Sector CAD Awards on November 14,2011 in Washington, D.C.

When we first launched the contest, we asked you to tell us how you have used digital design software to help your agency to achieve its goals and your response was phenomenal! Thank you to all who entered.

Meet our Finalists

From Guam to Florida, Washington, D.C. to New York, you shared examples of public sector innovations, best practices, cost saving strategies, and more. Our seven finalists include innovators from the Department of Defense, New York City Department of Design and Construction, the Ohio State Medical Center, and more.

Each of our finalists was hand-picked by our expert panel of judges as the movers and the shakers in the field of public sector digital design. Whether it’s improving the performance of their agency or enhancing the delivery of citizen services, our winners have made an impact.

For example, Ohio State Medical Center has spearheaded a program to transition from AutoCAD to BIM to dramatically improve how facility information is presented, helping to improve decision making about how space is used and renovated.

Celebrate and Honor our Winners in Washington, D.C.

To honor the achievements of each of our finalists and announce a winner, [acronym] is hosting our first annual [acronym] Magazine Public Sector CAD Awards ceremony which will take place on November, 14, 2011 from 8:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. at the National Building Museum, 401 F Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., 20001.

Bringing together our finalists, industry experts and the media, this free event will feature the following:

  • Motivational speaker, Vernice ‘FlyGirl’ Armour, America’s first African-American female combat pilot during Operation Iraqi Freedom
  • Interactive agenda sessions
  • An award ceremony recognizing the most creative and innovative users of digital design technology in the public sector space.

Register Today

If you can’t make it, look out for a blog report covering the awards event, showcasing our winners, and more.

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Virtualization, the dark side

Posted on November 7, 2011, 9:00 am, by Terry Freeman and received No Comments ».

The race to virtualize everything has created a host of unintended consequences, not the least of which is how to meet the SLAs (service level agreements) for application backup. As we move into cloud alternatives this problem will only grow since your cloud provider will have to provide this to you on an application by application basis.

Every virtual machine is essentially a set of large files such as VMDKs in a VMware context. These large files are typically stored in storage arrays which can be connected via iSCSI or Fiber Channel  or on NFS volumes. Traditional data protection techniques such as VMware’s VADP, or VMware VCB rely on an agent to protect VMDK files associated with virtual servers. Continue reading this post »

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