It is already the second half of August and we are quickly approaching a busy conference time for DLT. Up-coming events will take DLT all over the country, but some of the best are local ones happening just down the road. The annual Innovation Nation Forum, hosted by MeriTalk, will take place Tuesday, August 23 at the Washington Convention Center. Aiming to “Shake IT Up,” Innovation Nation will focus on three Federal IT hot topics- cloud computing, cybersecurity and data center consolidation.

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.

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:

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.

Check out the video below. It is a nice overview of NetApp Data Motion and shows how it enhances shared storage infrastructure.

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.

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.

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.

With many of us experiencing explosive growth, companies niched in broadcast, media, and entertainment are left trying to figure out how to improve data availability while minimizing cost.  Here at DLT we are helping customers:

• Eliminate wasteful copies
• Create centralized repository
• Simplify management
• Move data to the right storage tier automatically

How do we do this?  We at DLT have partnered with the industries best of breed vendors and forged them together to create a powerful solution.  The

What you talkin' 'bout, fool? Does anybody else remember the "A-Team” – Murdock, B.A. Baracus, Hannibal, and Faceman? When planning a mission, George Peppard – the one-time-“Banacek” star – and the “A-Team's” Hannibal, coined the line, "I love it when a plan comes together..." Well, we've been working with a group of Fed IT pros to put together a little caper of our own.