In this week's Technically News: When Disaster Strikes, Will Federal Data Be Safe; Dell, Oracle form Strategic Partnership for Integrated Systems; Translating Good Intentions Into Effective Cybersecurity Policy; 25 Most Influential Government CIOs.

In this week's Technically News: 5 Reasons the Government Needs to be More Like the Tech Industry; Lawmakers: What’s Still Missing in Data Center Consolidation; 5 Keys to Getting Big Data Under Control; Oracle: 4 Reasons Why Information Silos are Hindering Cloud Advantages; Amazon Web Services Gains FedRAMP Compliance for GovCloud; CloudCheckr Monitors Amazon GovCloud.

Government IT managers lack the in-house resources to expertly implement IT software, hardware, and systems. And with more budget cuts on the horizon, that gap will only widen. Earlier in the year, we expanded our Professional Services offering to help our customers.

esterday, I had the privilege of attending Deltek’s Federal Executive Breakfast where Robert Bigman, the CIA’s former Chief Information Security Officer gave a presentation on cybersecurity and his time with the Agency. My five key takeaways are:

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.

We are excited to announce the launch of Technically Speaking, DLT’s new podcast series dedicated to providing IT information to our public sector customers in an easy, listen-as-you-go format. TS will cover a variety of topics ranging from government IT initiatives to new products and solutions to any other topics that YOU would like to see discussed.

Despite the gnashing of teeth in 2009 when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, Sun's stewardship of Java seems to have passed, with very little turbulence, into capable hands. The language continues to evolve to address the productivity needs and desires of end users and mesh with the new computing models driven by the growth in web applications, mobile devices, and advances in hardware design and enterprise architectures.

Do you have a chief cloud technologist? What about a cloud architecture engineer? If you missed it on Federal News Radio the first time, take a minute to listen to Federal Tech Talk with host John Gilroy as he interviews DLT Solutions chief cloud technologist, David Blankenhorn. David fields questions on cloud architecture and discusses topics including:

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.