News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
The Navy Marine Corps Intranet is the largest individual network in the world. The only larger network is the Internet. This huge network sprawl requires a great deal of strategy, concern and planning. Over 700,000 users rely on the intranet to receive IT services. This is a huge network, and the NMCI cannot afford to take risks lightly, nor can they afford to be behind the eight-ball. NMCI uses VMware Infrastructure for a few different reasons. The … [Read more...]
Last week I attended a Carahsoft webinar with Virtual Instruments' Doug Norton and our very own Bob Gourley. The topic was the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, and what Virtual Instruments can do to help prepare your agency for consolidation. The key capability that Virtual Instruments brings to the table is the ability to identify and create real metrics for your data center and across the SAN. VI uses fibre channel technologies to copy … [Read more...]
Here are a few recent links of note on cybersecurity and disruptive technology: The Cyber Power Index by Booze Allen Hamilton. The G20 are ranked by their potency in cyber, determined by their legal and regulatory framework, economic and social context, technology infrastructure, and industry application. The United States is ranked second with the United Kingdom surprisingly first and China in 13th place. This tool is interactive and, if you … [Read more...]
Two years ago, the Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research launched the Magellan project, a research and development effort aimed at harnessing cloud computing for the most demanding information processing of the national labs. A distributed testbed infrastructure was deployed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the National Energy Research Scienti c Computing Center, then benchmarked for some of the most … [Read more...]
The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) is an important initiative in the federal space that seeks to enhance how the government delivers IT services in agencies and in some cases to citizens. Consolidating data centers offers opportunities for CIOs and CTOs to change IT strategy and implementations. The FDCCI should lead to improved federal capabilities while lessening the financial brunt on the taxpayers. Join Carahsoft, Doug … [Read more...]
Rackspace is a growing cloud computing capability provider that differentiates themselves by what they call "Fanatical Support." We try not to dwell too long on the marketing slogans of firms but have first-hand experience with Rackspace and can tell you their support is really really different. It must be the culture, but every support experience has left me convinced they are a great company to do business with. We host several sites at … [Read more...]
Join the local DC community at a Hadoop Users Group meeting on Wed, Jan 25th from 6-9pm at The National Press Club, 529 14th Street NW, 13th floor, Washington, DC. The event will feature Doug Cutting and Todd Lipcon each discussing a variety of Hadoop technical capabilities, as well as taking Q & A from the audience. Doug is the creator of numerous successful open source projects, including Lucene, Nutch and the co-creator of Apache Hadoop … [Read more...]
Amazon didn't invent cloud computing, but they deserve lots of credit for transforming the business model for providing cloud services through elastic computing (for some history see Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet from Businessweek Nov 2006). They have pushed the economics of cloud computing to be so efficient they are able to offer a 12 months worth of initial compute for free. This is a great opportunity to learn their interface and to test how their computing … [Read more...]
The vFabric Cloud Application Platform was built by VMware to help move applications and capabilities into the cloud (or cloud friendly architectures). This platform combines their "Spring" development platform to the vFabric service delivery solution. The vFabric offering is comprised of the following: The Spring framework used by millions of developers to build modern applications. tc Server: An enterprise version of Apache Tomcat application … [Read more...]
At first glance, cloud computing may seem to be distinct from the austere world of special operations forces (SOF). But Special Operations Technology's Eric Marks has a very interesting piece on how SOF can use the cloud to gain the tactical advantage. Some highlights: Cloud to the edge tactical mobile computing, which would feature the re-engineering of mission threads and processes so they could be executed by mobile devices. "This could include … [Read more...]