When Christine Schaefer joined value-added reseller DLT Solutions nine years ago, the firm did not have a strong reputation for proactive sales and marketing in the channel. Today, DLT is recognized as one of the Top 100 Government Contractors, and has its pick from a crowd of 300 technology providers who pursue it annually. At a time when government spending grew at three to five percent annually, DLT grew from $504 million in 2008 to nearly $800 million in 2010. What enabled the organization to transform itself from just another fulfillment reseller to a top government value-added reseller for many of the leading technology brands?

In a traditional Information Technology (IT) model, new IT assets are acquired in support of specific applications. This model has had the unfortunate side effect of casting IT into the role of a cost center. As such, there has been little flexibility within IT to make broad platform changes such as the adoption and deployment of private cloud technologies.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk –www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company OMB OMG Is Fed IT better after Kundra? Are cloud, data center, and cyber working? Where should Steven VanRoekel focus? As Fed IT makes it through year end, is Dell down and Amazon up? We put these questions and more to the Fed IT community at Innovation Nation on August 23. The new study, Over to You Mr. VanRoekel, gives the new Fed CIO a sense for his inheritance.

Much ado is being made these days about consolidation and reducing the cost of IT, with virtualization being the drivers for storage management improvements. The truth is that storage management, as well as application management and OS management, has always been a critical component of data centers. The fact that virtualization puts more pressure on these tasks is no excuse for overlooking them to date. Virtualization and “cloud” initiatives are increasing the demand on data centers to the point that they have no choice but to seek efficiencies. Or perhaps it is budget pressure that offers no choice and the storage demands of virtualization and cloud initiatives are making it harder to realize the savings.

One of the most effective ways to reduce fire fighting in daily administration is by standardizing the operating environments and automating deployment and configuration. A standard operating environment (SOE) that can support multiple use cases is a more robust and tested platform to build upon. It provides a uniform environment for troubleshooting when something goes awry. Reducing the differences in your operational environment to critical changes also reduces the overall complexity in multi-tier environments. Using centralized automation tools to define, build, and deploy these standards streamlines the process even more. Standardization is not a new concept, nor is it disruptive way of thought. The industrial revolution owes part of its existence to standardization. Computers and gadgets get reviewed and reviled based on adhering to standardized parts and ports. Yet for some reason, every environment I've worked in has one-off, bespoke systems to one degree or another. Some had admins who thought it was easier, better, smarter, more secure to build custom environments. Some had admins who wrote wrapper scripts around standard UNIX utilities because they didn't like the way a particular error was handled. The only real outcome was increasing difficulty of maintaining and replicating the systems. While bespoke suits will fit better at first, you'd best be prepared to work hard to exactly maintain your shape otherwise you're in for regular and expensive tailoring.

Symantec plans to release a full refresh of its Storage Foundation and Veritas Operations Manager software, which will include features allowing end-to-end management of private cloud infrastructures. Veritas Operations Manager (VOM) 4.0 is due out in May 2012. Storage Foundation 6.0 is planned for release in the second half of the year. One upcoming feature Symantec is planning is called Enterprise Object Store, which will use a global name space to offer a heterogeneous, enterprise-wide abstraction of all file data. According to Don Angspatt, vice president of product management for Symantec's storage and availability management group, the file system will be able to scale to petabytes in size and will be accessible through HTTP. "So this creates one common global repository. You can access data the same way you would [from a workstation] through your cell phone," he said.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk –www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company The Yellow Pages are so 1990. When America wants something, we hit a search engine. But, if you’re the only game in town, there’s no need for SEO - or is there...? The second Uncle Sam at Your Service Study provides government with real citizen feedback from the checkout line. And, the timing’s good. It’s been five months since the Prez dropped Executive Order 13571, calling for agencies to streamline service delivery and improve customer service.

“It's not the loud pronouncements by hacking groups or the highly visible denial-of-service attacks that scare cybersecurity experts. It's silence,” claims a recent Federal Times article. The article “Programs aim to get the word out when cyber attacks occur” brings light to the idea that one of the greatest tools against cyber attackers is the “relatively low-tech approach of sharing information about attacks.” The article continues on about a push for disclosure, explaining that the DoD has put forth ideas for a new Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) rule. The proposed DFARS rule would require contractors to provide “adequate security”, report cyber incidents within 72 hours, and review their networks to search for additional attack information. As always, the issue of cost tops the concerns about this communication technique. Not only would there be increased costs for the companies providing the “adequate security”, but government resources would have to be tapped in order to provide data analysis and enforcement of any resulting mandates.

This is my advice for customers who want to get started with storage efficiency: • Consider SATA drives instead of Fiber Channel • Enable Dedupe • (Use Flash Cache as insurance against bad performance) NetApp has other efficiency features too (thin provisioning, cloning, compression, and so on), but I’ve found that customers often start with SATA and dedupe. SATA because it saves so much money, and dedupe because it’s so easy to turn on and comes free with ONTAP. When I talk with customers who are using SATA and dedupe, they are usually happy with NetApp, and pleased with their storage costs. When customers are haggling over price but haven’t at least considered these features, I wonder what they are thinking. SATA with Flash Cache doesn’t always match the performance of Fiber Channel, but when it does, it can cut your costs in half. It’s definitely worth considering! We have many happy customers using it for production data. Home directories are a good place to start. Email, especially with the most recent versions of Exchange. Some customers use it for database, depending on the workload.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk –www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company The date on the tombstone - September 15. Open gov that was shouted from the rooftops on Obama’s first day died last week with barely a whisper - far from the headlines. The Senate approps subcommittee slashed $11 million from the House allocation, already $15 million under FY2010 funding. Transparency advocates like Sunlight are openly mourning the passing. But, the real question here is, does anybody really care?