Cindy Cassill is the director of systems integration in the office of the CIO for the US Department of State. Prior to her current position at the Department of State, Cindy has over 30 years of federal IT experience. She was the CIO at the FAA Regions & Centers. She also was the CIO at the US Army Test and Evaluation Command and was the director of IT at the deputy assistant secretary of the army for civilian personnel. This article highlights portions of Cindy Cassill’s presentation and the steps the agency took for their consolidation. Click Here to download the entire presentation and transcript at length.

Enterprise virtualization solutions offer a valuable way to reduce operating expenses by removing underutilized servers from data centers. New servers designed around virtualization workloads instead of traditional single application workloads are offered by many manufacturers. Hardware extensions to CPUs and PCI buses allow hypervisors to directly and efficiently present resources to virtual machines to reduce the performance penalty imposed by an additional layer between the application and system resources. Storage vendors offer adaptable configurations and integration with enterprise virtualization solutions. High speed and high bandwidth network interconnects deliver the necessary throughput to service the consolidated network traffic requirements.

By Jennifer Jackson Last month I attended Quantum’s First Annual Tech Summit in Englewood, Colorado Not only was the weather a gorgeous 70 degrees for the conference, but Quantum provided an equally great platform for System Engineers around the globe to make suggestions, learn from each other, and become familiar with the directions Quantum is taking.

With NetBackup 7.0, Symantec is no longer using VSP (VERITAS Snapshot Provider). This leaves you with the wonderful Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) from Microsoft. Solutions are well documented through technical articles and blogs for some of the common problems with VSS. But maybe, just maybe, you are that type of engineer that really wants to be the master of VSS and understand more about how to troubleshoot it. Troubleshooting your VSS issues are as easy as setting up tracing.

NetBackup offers a variety of ways to reduce storage capacity using deduplication. In fact, we believe our users should deduplicate everywhere. Backup is the killer app for deduplication. Why? Well a backup is essentially a copy of your information to be used for a recovery in the event of a corruption, or if something goes wrong. So it’s basically an insurance policy. So if you’re doing backups over the weekend and incrementals during the week and your data change rate isn’t that high, why backup the same thing over and over again? Just think of how many instances of a particular file or application that you have across your entire company. Say I send out a 3MB PowerPoint presentation for a review and a co-worker changes the title slide, another tweaks a bullet or two. Now there are 3 copies totaling 9 MB with only a few minor changes! Because of examples like that, it’s probably no surprise that data is growing at an alarming rate. The problem is that network, server, and storage systems are trying to keep up with this growth. Many organizations are still relying heavily on tape, yet still implementing next generation technologies like virtualization. That makes the outdated practice of keeping data forever impossible, especially while trying to meet today’s more aggressive service levels. Symantec believes deduplication should be natively integrated into any backup application, and in fact with NetBackup 7 it is. Deduplication should live in every part of the information architecture, at the source and the destination.

Exadata Larry, after expounding on the benefits of Oracle’s high performance cloud computing server—Exalogic— he went on to further tout version 3 of Oracle’s renowned database machine—Exadata. With the release of version 3, Oracle now offers customers two versions of its acclaimed database machine: X2-2 and X2-8. “The new configuration extends the Oracle Exadata Database Machine product family with a high-capacity system for large OLTP, data warehousing and consolidated workloads. There are now four configurations of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the new Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack and the Oracle Exadata X2-2 quarter-rack half-rack and full-rack systems. Offering customers a choice of configurations for managing small to large database deployments, the Oracle Exadata X2-2 and Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack machines can scale to multi-rack configurations for the most demanding database applications.” Larry emphatically proclaimed that Exadata has become the best machine for data warehousing and OLTP and he used SoftBank as an example. He indicated that at SoftBank Oracle replaced a 60-rack Teradata machines with only 3 full racks of Exadata and depending on the application those three (3) Exadata racks, ran 2xs to 8xs faster than the 60 rack Teradata configuration with only 5% of the hardware. Oracle eliminated 95% of the racks and on average still ran 5 times faster.

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.

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.