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?

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.

After more than five years in development Larry Ellison formally announced the release of Oracle’s Fusion Applications suite of products. The development of Fusion Applications started in 2004 and it is the largest engineering feat in the history of Oracle. “Oracle has taken the [best] functionality from its own eBusiness Suite applications, as well as its acquired PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel products, and rebuilt them to run on the company’s Fusion middleware,“ to form the next generation of enterprise application technology. By insisting on merging the best features from Oracle’s ERP, CRM, and HRMS products, Oracle created a Fusion applications design team using experienced engineers from eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JDE, and consolidated their design work on a single unified platform. Fusion Applications are the first enterprise applications to be written 100% on Standard Fusion Middleware. In previous releases of Oracle’s family of applications (eBS, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, and Siebel) the applications middleware was different from Oracle’s standard Fusion Middleware platform. Oracle in essence had two middleware development teams working separately on two types of middleware. The goal behind Fusion Applications was to combine the applications middleware team with the Fusion middleware team and extend Fusion Middleware to support Fusion Applications.

This is part three in a four part blog series Oracle Open World (OOW) Recap. To view part two, visit Oracle Open World Recap – Part II Similar to the Keynote on Sunday, Larry entered the stage and began his presentation to highlights of his America’s Cup victory. Still beaming over the victory, Larry graciously introduced members of the America’s Cup team that were in attendance and asked that they stand, as they stood and took a bow they received a much deserved round of applause and cheers. The stage was designed in the traditional Oracle two screen set -up and bathed Larry in a warm reddish hue. Larry wore his trademark dark suit and turtleneck and limited his bombastic and condescending comments to Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. Surprisingly, he only made one self-effacing or arrogant comment, depending on your perspective, when he called Bugatti his favorite commuter car. Not sure how many of us commute to work in a Bugatti so I don’t know how to interpret that comment so I will leave the interpretation up to the readers so that they can draw their own conclusion.

NetApp’s video below is another great example of their creative and fun work environment. While I have never seen “8 Mile”, the concept was very fun, and not to mention accurate. The video provides a lot of good facts about Data Deduplication and sets the record straight on many issues or concerns that people may have.

Having problems with trying to do eDiscovery with NetBackup? Stop! Just Stop! For the love of NetBackup…. Stop! Find out more about the marriage between NetBackup and Enterprise Vault.

Veritas Storage Foundation has an optional utility called Simple Admin, that you can switch Veritas File system and Veritas Volume Manager. The Simple Admin utility simplifies storage management by providing a single interface to the administrator and by abstracting the administrator from many of the commands needed to create and manage volumes, disk groups, and file systems.

Quest Software, DLT and NetApp recently sponsored a panel discussion in Washington to discuss data center consolidation and cloud computing. The panel participants were progressive well-respected IT leaders from different federal agencies that had all launched consolidation projects. The speakers reported that most projects would take several years and acknowledged that consolidations were really evolutionary transformations to achieve long term objectives. The ultimate goal for each agency is to have no more than 5 major production sites with total capacity to serve both the current and future needs. Even after consolidating and increasing utilization rates, the plans predicted there would be excess IT capacity – theoretically this capacity could be “reallocated” to other entities.

After attending the well put together DLT, NetApp, and Quest Software sponsored IT Consolidation Executive Forum I realized how important of a topic this is to our public sector agencies including the State and local sector. At many of these types’ forums and shows, sometimes, IT Consolidation doesn’t seem too relevant. But given the state of data growth, many who attended are planning on implementing data centers which use the technologies included with virtualization and IT consolidation. Cindy Cassil exemplified this in her presentation by giving specific examples of the implementation at Department of State and showing how it was accepted by her boss immediately because it showed how they could standardize and save money. She also pointed out the need for putting together the right team, she mentioned the NetApp engineers, with the right skills to make sure that everything was put into place correctly.