How's your virtualization and data center consolidation strategy progressing? Have you hit a plateau after virtualizing everything you can? With all eyes firmly fixed on the cloud, why would I bring up virtualization? Virtualization has come and gone, everyone's done it, there's nothing left. Right? Not so fast.

Children won’t be the only ones trick-or-treating this month. Last year, federal agencies reported an estimated 3,574 incidents every month in 2011 according to the Government Accountability Office. The same office also said incidents reported have increased nearly 680% in the last six years. Due to rising cyber terrorism and the need for increased cyber security, President Obama has designated October “National Cyber Security Awareness Month”.

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.

After months of researching, writing, and editing, the DLT Cloud Advisory Group recently completed its new reference eBook, Cloud Computing for Govies™!

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:

Cloud computing and virtualization. If you work within the federal, state and local, and higher education IT industries, you most likely have been exposed to these terms. However, for some, understanding the distinction between the two can be a little confusing. This year at FOSE 2011, DLT Solutions and Quest Software helped visitors cut through the fog of uncertainty surrounding this issue. During the event, DLT asked public-sector IT professionals to participate in a series of “Minute to Win It” style games to illustrate the complexities of cloud computing and virtualization. These games were designed to show participants that not everything is as simple as it looks which according to a Norwich University study*, proves that they are not alone.

The race to virtualize everything has created a host of unintended consequences, not the least of which is how to meet the SLAs (service level agreements) for application backup. As we move into cloud alternatives this problem will only grow since your cloud provider will have to provide this to you on an application by application basis. Every virtual machine is essentially a set of large files such as VMDKs in a VMware context. These large files are typically stored in storage arrays which can be connected via iSCSI or Fiber Channel or on NFS volumes. Traditional data protection techniques such as VMware's VADP, or VMware VCB rely on an agent to protect VMDK files associated with virtual servers.

Are technology trends such as Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Open Source Software the Shake Weights of the IT Industry? Are IT professionals relying on them to be the magic bullet/quick fix for solving software efficiency? That’s the question that Jason Corey, U.S. Navy Client Executive at Red Hat proposes in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for the Navy Webcast.

In a traditional Information Technology (IT) model, new IT assets are acquired in support of specific applications. This model has had the unfortunate side effect of casting IT into the role of a cost center. As such, there has been little flexibility within IT to make broad platform changes such as the adoption and deployment of private cloud technologies.