The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) recently published the latest in a series of issue briefs on analytics titled "Is Big Data a Big Deal for State Governments?" The objective of this first issue brief on Big Data is to put a foundation for future briefs and discussion forums in place. All aspects of Big Data technologies are examined while also exploring its potential relevance to state IT operations. The document is an excellent starting point for both technical and non-technical decision makers in state governments who are considering expanding the use of technology to deliver new citizen services and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of existing services and IT operations.

Big data is just two words and yet these two words are driving hysteria throughout the known world at a level not seen since Y2K. We supposedly create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day now and at this rate we can conclude that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This does sound apocalyptic as it suggests that we could drown in data far before global warming floods our coastal cities into oblivion. Are we being rational? I think not and this calls for an explanation.

A little over a month ago, I highlighted the differences between Big Data and data from ten years ago. I also covered how Big Data solutions unlock new approaches to turning data into information and information into knowledge that can be acted upon. Now, let’s take a closer look at some ways that Big Data might be exploited in the public sector (and in some cases is already being exploited). These examples may help to trigger specific ideas for leveraging Big Data to address your agency’s mission.

What do you do when you have a client that is not communicating with your master server? First, you should check the firewall rules and open port configurations to verify that everything looks right. You should then check the host file where you are likely to see line after line of names. If you’re anything like me, you probably find this very frustrating. Everyone wants to use a short name, bypass protocol, or short cuts via host files, but do they realize this can create confusion and issues?

Datacenter growth is one of the larger challenges encountered by datacenter managers today. The key solutions to combat these challenges are consolidation and virtualization. There are many virtualization solutions available, such as Oracle VM, and all of them are effective for server consolidation. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance can integrate and interoperate with any of these solutions but does best with Oracle VM and VMware.

In the past, we’ve discussed server consolidation using virtualization technologies like RHEV. And we know that there are tangible reductions in physical footprint by moving to an enterprise virtualization solution as increased utilization of fewer, more powerful servers with advanced memory capabilities is standard fare for today's data center architectures.

When it comes to disaster recovery, there has historically been a limitation on disk storage. While tapes can easily be sent offsite to be used for restores after a site outage, disks do not offer the same flexibility. Some OpenStorage technologies, support out-of-band replication in which the contents of the disk storage are replicated between devices. In these instances, NetBackup has no knowledge of the data, which complicates recovery in a NetBackup protected environment because the replicated data can only be accessed after recreating the NetBackup catalog. Replication is done by importing the entire contents of the disk storage at the remote site using the bpimport command. The nbcatsync utility, introduced in NetBackup 6.5.6 and 7.0.1, can address this challenge as well, but it relies on being able to restore the catalog from a catalog backup and then post-processing it to reconcile the disk device mappings, resulting in a very time consuming process.

Who hasn’t run into that pesky old ‘Status Code 2’ problem? Your backup fails with a NetBackup message indicating that "none of the requested files were backed up." Well, let me dig through my notes and see what I did about it… Ah, yes! I remember when a customer ran into a Status Code 2 error when running an SQL database backup. In my investigation to help them fix the problem, I stumbled across a Symantec support article specifically focused on this issue.

LiveUpdate is a NetBackup feature that allows administrators to quickly and easily upgrade NetBackup clients under central control using a special NetBackup policy. Previous releases of NetBackup offered limited functionality for LiveUpdate, providing only the ability to upgrade to a minor update of the current version (e.g., from NetBackup 6.5.5 to 6.5.6). In contrast, NetBackup 7.1 has the ability to update a client even if it’s running a previous major version (NetBackup 6.5 and later). LiveUpdate operates with any supported NetBackup client system, including UNIX, Linux and Windows machines, and can update a mixture of UNIX, Linux and Windows clients from a single LiveUpdate policy. It’s important to understand that NetBackup LiveUpdate is not the same as the LiveUpdate service that many other Symantec products use. The NetBackup version only runs when the administrator explicitly executes it and it does not pull data from Symantec or any other location on the Internet. All update information is contained on servers that are controlled by the NetBackup administrator. It’s also important to note that other installation methods are still supported; LiveUpdate is an optional tool. If administrators prefer to use the standard NetBackup client installation utilities, they may still do so.

Way back in 2003, an eternity in tech years, Network Appliance purchased Spinnaker Networks an appliance maker that utilized SpinFS. Since the acquisition NetApp , as it is now called, has developed two different operating system offerings a.k.a. their “special sauce.” The original ONTAP “flavor” (ONTAP 8 7-mode) and the ONTAP 8 Cluster-mode, a reincarnate of technology acquired from Spinnaker and previously known as ONTAP GX.