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.

I attended an all-boys high school. At 16, we had no idea how to talk to women. It seems OMB is tongue-tied too when it comes to FISMA reform, CyberScope, and chatting up CIOs and CISOs. As the deadline for all agencies to use CyberScope for FISMA reporting looms – November 15, 2010 – it looks like OMB is in serious danger of going to the prom alone. A new MeriTalk study – FISMA's Facelift – reports that as of July 2010, 85 percent of Federal IT security leaders have yet to go on a first date with CyberScope. If beauty is only skin deep, let’s dig beneath the surface. Of the 85 percent “CyberScope virgins,” 72 percent don’t understand CyberScope’s mission and goals – and 90 percent don’t know how to get lucky – they’re unclear on the submission requirements. 55 percent question CyberScope’s economic benefits – asserting it will increase cost. Most damaging, Feds don’t see the value of courting. 55 percent don’t believe CyberScope will improve security oversight and 69 percent are unsure if the new approach will improve Uncle Sam’s cyber security.

Disk Staging Storage Unit (DSSU) cleanup behavior is different in NetBackup 6.5 in comparison with prior versions. NetBackup 6.5 staging and high water mark processing is very different from 5.x and 6.0. In NetBackup 5.x and 6.0, High Water Mark value does not apply to disk staging storage units. The only condition that triggered staged (but not expired) image cleanup was the disk full condition reached during a backup. If this was encountered, all disk backups to that media server (not only to that storage unit) were temporarily paused and a cleanup process was launched to clean the oldest 10 images that had been staged. This would not necessarily mean that it would hit the Low Water Mark as a result. Backups were then resumed until the disk full condition was encountered again, and then the process would repeat. In essence, staged images were cleaned up in a reactive manner in NetBackup prior to 6.5.

I just returned from Oracle Open World (“OOW”) 2010 and it was a tremendous show. In fact, it was so outstanding that I had to break my analysis into four parts: my two part general overview of the conference, a preview of Oracle’s most recent product announcements, and a preview of Oracle’s latest addition to the Exadata product line. This year’s version of Open World was extremely well organized and attended. The events are always top notch and they do a very nice job with logistics moving people around the city and in/out of the Moscone Center (which is one of the better convention centers I’ve attended.). The weather was very accommodating (mid 70’s light breeze) with no rain. The planning committee should take this into consideration given that last year’s convention in October experienced tumultuous rain storms and impaired an otherwise great convention. The weather in September has been consistently better over the years than in October and hopefully OOW will be solidly entrenched in September going forward.

"Why are agencies forced to pay twice to C&A systems?" said the exasperated and cash-strapped Federal IT exec. "If agency A wants to use a system from agency B - a system that has already been C&A'd - then agency A needs to pay for a completely new C&A. If we're spending more than 20 percent of our cyber security budget on C&A - and the average C&A costs $167,643 - shouldn't we look for efficiencies?" An observation over lunch was quickly validated by other Feds - IT execs battling with the double-headed budget and security dragon. Curious stuff. The FISMA C&A reciprocity riddle set me on a fool's errand to put a dollar figure on the cost of C&A redundancy. That said, it opened a new window on OMB's lack of transparency - quite astonishing in this era of open government.

The explosive growth of Web traffic is placing tremendous pressure on enterprises and ISPs. To meet these demands, organizations have had to increase investments in bandwidth, or be crippled by slowdowns in performance. But now there’s an intelligent way to manage this explosive growth. NetApp C700 series Web caching appliances. By distributing frequently viewed content closer to end users, NetCache appliances reduce network traffic up to 60% and increase performance by a factor of 10. NetCache appliances scale the existing bandwidth, eliminate the need for additional infrastructure and deliver a fast return on investment. The NetApp C700 series is unlike any other Web caching solution because of its unique appliance architecture, which provides reliability, deploy ability and ease of administration for both ISP and enterprise networks. NetCache appliances deliver unparalleled performance by providing native caching support for Internet protocols such as HTTP, FTP and NNTP.

I often joke about this common NetBackup support question. Though this is my candid and brutally honest answer, there is a way to benchmark what you could expect from backing up a particular client by examining the performance of the bpbkar process. Though there are many factors that impact the overall backup performance of a specific client this is a good starting point.

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.

18 years ago. It was 1992. Gas prices were a mere $1.13 per gallon, our Vice President infamously misspelled everyone’s favorite Idaho export, and the Buffalo Bills lost in the Super Bowl…again. 1992 also marks the last time AutoCAD, Autodesk’s flagship 2D and 3D design software, was available on Apple computers. Fast forward to 2010. While the Bills are still losing, AutoCAD is talking steps in the right direction. Earlier this week Autodesk announced they will release a new version of its most popular computer-aided design software and engineering tool, AutoCAD, that will run natively on Mac OS X.

NetApp has a robust data protection suite that can archive and replicate data as well as integrate with most primary applications like collaboration, database, web and virtualization technologies. The foundation for this data protection is the NetApp Snapshot. A Snapshot is a read-only point-in-time image of the active file system. The Snapshot technology is an integrated feature of WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout), a block-based file system that uses inodes to reference files that are built into Data ONTAP, the micro kernel that runs on all NetApp storage. When a snapshot is requested, WAFL creates a new Snapshot by making an exact copy of the root inode. This copy of the root inode becomes the root of the data representing the Snapshot, just as the root inode represents the active file system. When the Snapshot inode is created, it points to exactly the same disk blocks as the root inode, so a brand new Snapshot consumes no disk space except for the Snapshot inode itself.