News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
The Government Big Data Newsletter grew out of the first Government Big Data Forum. The newsletter is meant to contribute to dialog in-between our in-person meetings, and will supplement information that is provided here on our CTOvision.com Big Data articles. The newsletter is being produced in both hardcopy and electronic versions. Our intent is to capture lessons learned, best practices and use cases that will help readers think through new ways … [Read more...]
Walking Through the Front Door Many corporations today have become dependant upon their websites. Where once websites were simply information portals or advertisments for their owners, they have transformed into something far greater. Today companies all over the world rely on their websites to log in remotely, provide news and information to employees and shareholders, or allow customers to access services. Too often we hear about huge … [Read more...]
I was recently treated to a demonstration of a mission-focused IT solution that made me proud of what technologists at FBI can do. What I saw was a best in class integration of search, discovery and analysis tools known as DIVS (Data Integration and Visualization System). DIVS includes a framework that allows multiple tools, COTS and GOTS, to interoperate in ways incredibly supportive of the most significant missions in the national security … [Read more...]
Crucial Point LLC subsidiary CTOlabs.com has just published the results of a study on the impact of data growth in government. To download your copy see: http://www.carahsoft.com/dedupesurvey From the press release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/04/prweb5243224.htm Data Growth and Virtualization Mandate New Approach to Federal Storage Management Survey Finds Data Deduplication Aids in Managing Data Growth in Federal … [Read more...]
Last week Amazon announced a new cloud-based, consumer-oriented service offering called Amazon Cloud Drive. According to the company, the Cloud Drive is “your hard drive in the cloud.” It will allow users to store “music, videos, photos and documents online and access them from anywhere.” Cloud Drive let people store up to five gigabytes of music, photos, videos and documents. The basic storage is free; additional space can be purchased for … [Read more...]
If you're reading this, you probably already know about Apache's Hadoop, a popular data storage and analysis platform. Hadoop can inexpensively store any type of information from any source on commodity hardware and allow for fast, distributed analysis run in parallel on multiple servers in a Hadoop Cluster. It's powerful, agile, scalable, and, due to replication, resilient to hardware and systems failures. But when should you use Hadoop? The white … [Read more...]
If you thought data management was difficult in business, imagine the nightmare it becomes in the Navy. The Navy faces monumental and unique challenges with its shipboard networks as, just like everywhere else, data flows continue to increase. The systems aboard US ships tend to be outdated since they can only be upgraded while the ship is in port, and incompatible with each other because they tend to run unique software on custom-made hardware, … [Read more...]
On 26 January 2011 government IT professionals, federally-focused systems integrators and IT vendors met in the Government Big Data Forum to dialog on issues of common concern on the topic of overwhelming data. This event, sponsored by Carahsoft, included presentations, discussions, panels and a tech expo all focused on the issue of "Big Data" in the federal enterprise. Attendees heard from speakers like Dawn Meyerriecks, Deputy Director of … [Read more...]
Carahsoft has just announced more details on the 2011 Government Big Data Forum. This should be a great event for discourse on the struggles faced by Government IT regarding the breadth of data they handle. Both civilian and military agencies require more data storage every day. But the reason to have data is not to store it! The reason to have data is to improve mission. You must manage and move and make sense of data to serve the mission and … [Read more...]
The Endeca Government Summit was yesterday. The agenda included some fantastic presentations from customers who have used Endeca to address issues requiring incredible scale (billions of records) and incredible scope (including the need to discover meaning in data in milliseconds) and human-focused interfaces (including, in every solution I saw, an ability to enable humans to interact with data in ways that search never enables). One of my … [Read more...]