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 It seems amnesia is in fashion in D.C. OMB's data center consolidation admission that it stumbled across an additional 1,000 data centers was greeted by more smirks than surprise. Now that gives a whole new meaning to "government oversight." But, it seems that server farms aren't the only thing the Federal government's mislaying. According to a new MeriTalk study, "Uncle Sam's Lost & Found - $15.4B," Federal agencies are challenged to lay hand on information in their own databases and servers.

Can the government really save $15B by improving the way they search for documents? A recent survey of 300 federal employees, Uncle Sam's Lost and Found: $15.4 Billion, indicates that improvements can be made in several areas. The best place to start is with training, standards and the enforcement of standards. Sure, most agencies have established naming conventions, file storage procedures and a host of other ‘best practices’, but how often are these standards reviewed to ensure compliance? Focusing on some of these fundamentals will certainly improve the efficiency of file search. Unfortunately, training and standards will not fully resolve the challenge. One survey participant expressed the desire to have the ability to search for documents at work the same way they search for data at home – via search tools like Google. The benefits of a search appliance deployed within an agency are many. The search appliances are able to be customized to fit the agency needs, the interface is familiar, and the technology is scalable. The amount of data stored by organizations grows exponentially year after year, so the problem is only going to increase. Is $15B in savings a realistic number? The data suggests that the savings is just the tip of iceberg.

For Public Sector (“PS”) customers, the networking continued on Monday night at the only purely PS focused event at Open World, the annual Oracle Public Sector Reception at Jillian’s. This Industry event is where PS customers could meet with Oracle PS experts for a night of food, drink, and sports, in a casual environment while watching Monday Night Football on several big screen TV’s in a fun sports atmosphere. This year’s event was heavily attended relative to past years; I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout.. The pool tables were packed with lines 2-3 people deep at each table so some additional games would have helped alleviate the overflow on the pool tables. This was a good problem to have considering that the majority of attendees were customers and not Oracle employees. I would suggest to Jillian’s that they add foosball and air hockey to their inventory of games next year to help alleviate the wait for a pool table. I would specifically suggest these two games based on their popularity at the “Game Zone” lounge in the Exhibit Hall. Both of these games were extremely popular and were only preceded in popularity by “Dance Dance Revolution” and the ever popular “Pop a Shot!” The only thing not included in the carnival atmosphere of the Exhibit halls and game lounge was a carnival barker, a palm reader, candied applies, and stuffed animals. I left having won 3 out of 5 air hockey games but without any prizes or cotton candy for my efforts. I did, however, have a wonderful time and I encourage Oracle to keep up that tradition at future Open Worlds especially for those attendees that bring children.

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.

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.

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.

DLT has recognized this trend and the growing demand for these types of services in our earlier report on Top Trends in ERP for 2010. In that report we suggested that new license growth would slow in 2010 to single digits and that IT Services would outpace new ERP Sales by almost 50% and register double digit growth in 2010 and beyond. To take advantage of this trend, and to better meet the needs of our customers, DLT has evolved beyond the traditional VAR model to provide our customers with the necessary services to meet this growing market. This is a business model which we feel will shortly begin to replace the traditional VAD and VAR models as license and service businesses begin to merge in order to replace the decrease in new license growth and the subsequent drop in revenue. To stay ahead of this trend DLT has partnered with SmartDog Services to deliver complementary services, fixed-priced limited engagements, and enhanced software support, to all of our existing and new customers who choose to take advantage of these services. This isn’t unprecedented and we believe that it will become more pronounced and commonplace in 2011.

I thought I would take a brief break from my Tuning NetBackup series to write about a great Symantec website called VERITAS Operations Services (VOS). VOS is a great site that can be used to “dive deep” into your particular VERITAS software configurations. This is not your standard support site where you can get lost in the sea of menus and documentation for all of Symantec products. What makes VOS special is that you can utilize the site to get customized information on Installation, Upgrades, and perform Risk Assessments.