One evening last week I was watching an episode of 60 Minutes where they were examining the information several scientists have collected about the melting of the icecaps in Antartica. During the discussion, they mentioned that the resulting melt was providing a crucial source of drinking water for people in India, China and several other large countries. It started me thinking about the water that we drink everyday – where it comes from, how it gets to us, and how can we make the best decisions about our responsibility to the source of our water supply. We spend 8 hours a day, 5 days per week here at DLT. During that time, many of us make use of the water coolers that are located in the two DLT kitchens. Sometimes there’s even a line while everyone fills up their various containers. It’s a great thing – and I mean really great! And not just from a social perspective.

The Maginot Line was a collection of walls, bunkers, tanks and artillery posts constructed by the French in the 1930’s and 40’s as a line of fortification against Germany and Italy. It prevented direct attacks, but was easily outflanked by the German’s in WWII when they invaded Belgium and then walked into France in less than two days. The Line has become a cliché for failed military planning and execution. The truth is messier. The Maginot Line did cause the German’s to concentrate their forces along the French-Belgium border and it did give the allies time to regroup and defend. Nevertheless, it is considered to be one of the colossal military and strategic blunders of all time.

So over a year into the Cloud Computing marketing machine, does anyone really understand what it is? You hear about vendors such as Terremark, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. offering some form of cloud computing. But what do they really offer? Can any agency just move their email or applications “into the cloud?” Let’s start with a definition… What types of Cloud Computing are there? Cloud computing breaks down into one of 3 areas: • Infrastructure as a Service: This is the traditional Managed Server Providers like Rackspace that provides their server to a customer on a monthly or yearly basis. Infrastructure such as power, data networking, and cooling are offloaded to them, and applications and operating system are the customer’s responsibility. • Platform as a Service: This is a model that vendors such as Google Apps and Amazon operate in. The vendor provides a “platform,” whether that’s email services, web, or storage hosting. This pulls the management of the underlying application and operating system to the vendor from the customer. This allows the customer to quickly add capacity if needed on demand. • Software as a Service: These are the ASPs (application service providers) such as SalesForce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, and Remedy on Demand. The ASP hosts all aspects of the application and platform, and provides access in a multi-tenant environment that is shared across all their customers.

Did you know that NetApp has a news program that talks about the latest happenings at the company? If you didn’t, that’s ok. A good starting place would be their 2010 review. Take a look at the video below:

In a previous blog, my colleague Aaron Payne was discussing getting back to security basics. In his blog, Aaron mentioned thin provisioning. I came across a great video from NetApp that talks about this very topic. Check it out below:

I really enjoy these “Play by Play” segments with NetApp’s Mike Riley. In his latest, he talks about NetApp Unified Storage. This is a good lead in to the webcast we are having in a few weeks on the very same topic. Check out the video below and learn more about the webcast here.

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 Sometimes great ideas run into roadblocks. That's when you need to think differently. Who could argue with today's data center consolidation direction? Green, secure, efficient – this is apple pie stuff. So, why is the Hill sending the platter back to the kitchen – and questioning the bill? Perhaps it's time to reconsider the recipe?

Managers in the Public Sector are wrestling with the wide range of options provided by the evolving Cloud services paradigm. Most are now familiar with the three Cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and more than a few are testing the waters. The proliferation of Cloud services from a wide range of name brand vendors and the success stories from commercial companies provides a certain level of confidence that government agencies can realize similar economies in shifting to the Cloud for at least some IT services. Indeed, OMB, in its ‘Cloud First’ policy, has mandated serious consideration of the Cloud by agencies as the federal Data Center Consolidation initiative is implemented.

Hal, the IT Admin from Symantec takes a look at data deduplication in this quick video. Symantec offers a great product in BackupExec that helps deal with this issue. Check out the video below:

Check out the video below. It is a nice overview of NetApp Data Motion and shows how it enhances shared storage infrastructure.