A couple of weeks ago we posted an interview DLT’s Chief Cloud Technologist David Blankenhorn did with fedScoop. The interview focused on open source software for government and included a question on how DLT supports it. To answer the question, David mentions our long time partnership with Red Hat.

David Blankenhorn, DLT’s Chief Cloud Technologist, recently sat down with fedScoop TV to discuss the importance of open source software for government. In addition to providing an overview of the open source landscape, David includes recommendations for agencies exploring open source options.

Are technology trends such as Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Open Source Software the Shake Weights of the IT Industry? Are IT professionals relying on them to be the magic bullet/quick fix for solving software efficiency?

That’s the question that Jason Corey, U.S. Navy Client Executive at Red Hat proposes in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for the Navy Webcast.

“Linux is important as a technology, but what it does transcends technology,” — Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO @ LinuxCon 2011 Keynote

September marks the 20th anniversary of the initial 0.01 release of the Linux kernel to the world, by self-proclaimed hobbyist Linus Torvalds, as an unportable and unprofessional free operating system. Little did Linus know that he was starting a project that would become one of the leading choices in the operating system space.

Perhaps a bit of a cliché, I first experimented with Linux in college. At that time, CS homework involved coding on a Windows platform then porting and re-debugging on the RS6000s, where assignments were graded. While I was lucky to have access to Borland on Windows, the porting process was painful enough that waiting in line for UNIX lab systems still made sense. Then we got remote access to a Linux system at a nearby community college. The POSIX-based environment made the porting process much simpler and faster overall, meaning I could spend more time on other classes.

I’m often asked about specific workflows within Red Hat’s Satellite management tool. We’ll take a look at a few common admin scenarios. One of the most common uses of Satellite is for centralized kickstart and provisioning. Here we’ll walk through creating a new kickstart profile and some common options.

Evaluating agency needs in the face of new directives like the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative can be daunting. Analyzing emerging technology in terms of an enterprise architecture is complicated at best, but divorcing the service mission from the technology can highlight less disruptive paths for integrating new paradigms. Understanding and leveraging the benefits of a loosely coupled design will make technology shifts attainable.
Cloud computing is the next step in computing evolution. The concepts and techniques in play are the culmination of years converging technologies. We are seeing the perfect storm of technology and practice bringing out a new and exciting methodology. Cloud architecture promises all of the features that system architects and administrators have struggled to deliver for years: elastic, scalable, fault tolerant computing resources.

Normally this space is reserved for technical talk, but I was recently fortunate enough to attend Mil-OSS and wanted to take a moment to talk about the group.
First off, Mil-OSS is a working group, not a conference. There are presentations and talks, but this is a group of people coming together to work toward a common goal: increasing the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) inside the Department of Defense. It runs the gamut of interested parties: end users who are deploying OSS solutions in the field to members of the defense technology industry to prominent OSS project members. The group has one overriding tenant: through the adoption of open source software and methods, the DoD can accomplish its primary mission while increasing capability and agility.

In my last blog, I talked about how U.S. government agencies as well as State and Local agencies are adopting open source software into their enterprise architectures.  It is gaining momentum and in my opinion will continue to do so.  One key reason is due to the development model which drives it.  Innovation is encouraged [...]

During a recent visit to an Oracle Partner Summit in Denver, Colorado, I had an opportunity to attend some very impressive presentations and learn everything there is to learn about the product direction of JDE World and Enterprise One.

Virtualization is very much on the minds of IT managers this year. Some have the vision of a low power, smoothly running, optimized data center; thinly staffed but capable of provisioning new users almost instantaneously (AKA ‘Nirvana’). Others see the nightmare of single points of (hardware) failure bringing down an entire agency, virtual machines migrating [...]