I think they should change the language in the federal telework mandate. 

It should really be called the “mobility mandate.” I say this because it’s not about telework anymore. It’s really about empowering users, not just when they are at home, but anytime they are not sitting at their desks.

This shouldn’t just be a mandate because of the cost benefits involved, but also because there is a huge security risk for not supporting mobility better. Users are “going rogue,” as I call it.

Users want to be more effective and therefore they are rapidly adopting various technologies that endanger data security every day. I like to mention Dropbox because most IT managers immediately moan and nod in agreement. But it’s only one of many examples of users finding ways to work around the lack of mobility support offered by government agencies.

The biggest drag on mobility/telework projects has been a lack of a business case or that agencies have yet to assess a project to determine its ROI. If an agency only sees complying with the telework mandate as a savings for the employee and the environment, why would they choose pursuing compliance of that mandate over another one that could also save the agency money? But the problem is much larger than cost, so that shouldn’t be the only determining factor. Agencies are now facing a much larger problem —huge security risks due to insufficient mobility options.

I read an article regarding this problem, and they had the wrong answer in my opinion:

“Though panelists agreed security was the main challenge in advancing the mobile workforce, they also agreed cloud computing was key to the solution.

‘The current state of affairs is not perfection,’ said General Services Administration CIO Casey Coleman. ‘We need a layered security environment ... appropriate for the risk and the information. Strategies like cloud computing actually improve our ability to have security. Then the device becomes more of a viewing platform.’”

Really? Cloud computing adds to the security concerns surrounding mobility —it certainly doesn’t solve them. But I wouldn’t expect any other answer from Casey Coleman. She’s gone crazy for cloud computing. 

You see, GSA is off the charts with the support and deployment of the cloud, risking non-compliance with government security mandates and even evangelizing their mistakes to other agencies.  NOAA followed GSA to Gmail, and NOAA’s Cloud Computing Program Manager Stefan Leeb publicly stated at the Cloud Computing Exchange recently that they were out of compliance for security and other information assurance mandates. Google refused to fix the problems.

So if cloud computing doesn’t fix the problems, what does?

One sure way that security can be addressed is to stop all access to the data center outside of a controlled virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) system. With VDI, IT can control not only what applications reside on a user’s desktop, but also when and what devices have access. It’s a great solution, and —if deployed correctly —it can offer a better user experience both at and away from desks while saving 66 percent of desktop costs in a normal desktop/laptop budget. The key to that statement is “if deployed correctly.” VDI is a project that touches the users’ lives significantly; it has to be done right the first time.

SwishData has robust VDI experience and rich engineering expertise to offer any agency to make sure first-time implementation is done right. For more information, check out our telework and VDI solution briefs or info@swishdata.com directly.

SwishData is also talking cloud, VDI and more on Twitter and Facebook.

Did you miss Part 1? Get caught up here.

Anyone who’s been inside a government data center lately would describe them as devoid of people. It is a highly controlled environment, with just a few high-level techs working, if there’s anyone there at all. Most of the work is done outside the data center.

Now throw big data and powerful Hadoop processing into the picture and imagine agencies trying to change this entire model by adding lots of hardware jockeys running around replacing parts (and pulling their hair out). It’s just not going to happen, and it doesn’t have to. Shared enterprise storage and compute power can remove the problem of needing extra techs to keep nodes running while still offering the value of Hadoop.

Flexible and efficient 

In addition, when shared storage and compute architectures are used, the needs of the cluster can be scaled up and down independently and much more efficiently. This makes the entire enterprise more flexible and gives more users access to reliable data processing power when they need it — this is a big idea for dealing with big data. By pooling resources, programs agency-wide don’t have to worry about a few nodes going offline, and processing power those programs aren’t using isn’t just wasting space — it’s being actively shared across the enterprise.

Why share nothing when you can share everything and get the advantage of power that might’ve just been sitting unused? Sharing makes for a more flexible, reliable and consistently efficient Hadoop cluster.

For example, if you’re using the shared model and a disk fails on a NetApp array, performance will not be compromised nearly as much as when nodes go offline in a shared-nothing model. No one needs to run in and replace the hard drive or cheap compute node in a hurry. In fact, without shared storage and enterprise compute architectures, you could be faced with many nodes going offline at once in an enterprise data center for a significant amount of time.

Sometimes, you just have to kick the beast — even if it’s a respected industry giant like Google or Facebook who still take the shared-nothing route (perhaps they still have an antiestablishment mentality, despite their size). Just remember: The most prevalent way isn’t always the forward-thinking way of doing things.

jpbergeaux@swishdata.com if you’re interested in learning more about running a shared resources Hadoop cluster. Or, you can employ lots of people to constantly go around swapping from a stash of onsite spare parts.

Connect with us on  Facebook and  Twitter.

Why do Facebook, Google and other Internet giants employ a shared-nothing method of storage and computational resources? Simply put, they just didn’t start with a true enterprise environment.

Those companies started as a small cluster of servers (unlike what government agencies now deal with), and it made sense then. But they’ve since grown into having mega data centers without adapting their architectures. It’s not how a true enterprise works, and it’s not efficient — but don’t tell them that.

There’s definitely a fanaticism built around shared-nothing that is tough to break through.

Hadoop and the shared-nothing data center

Hadoop, originally funded by Yahoo!, emerged in 2006 and hit Web-scale capability in 2008. At its core, it’s an open-source MapReduce implementation that has the ability to take a dataset, divide the data, and run it in parallel over multiple nodes. Hadoop applies to nearly any market, from financial modeling to mission outcome forecasting.

Initially, Hadoop was designed to run on a large number of machines that don’t share memory or disks, like the shared-nothing model mentioned above. All processing would be done in self-contained units within the cluster, communicating over a common network but sharing no computing resources. The software breaks large datasets in smaller pieces and spreads it across the different servers. You run a job by querying each of the servers in the cluster, which compile the data and deliver it back to you, leveraging each server’s processing power.

It’s a great design, but doesn’t require shared-nothing to operate.

The problem with white boxes and being stingy

The functionality of shared storage and shared compute cannot be matched by throwing whitebox servers at the problem within shared-nothing architecture. These independent servers present several problems, including management issues, requiring additional data center space, lack of a single point of support for disparate parts and increased costs to get the functionality of tested, name-brand servers. Don’t miss that mention of more data center space. That’s a problem for federal agencies. When you use whitebox servers, you have to have a lot more floor space to rack all these servers that hold their own storage (and more of it, HDFS3 vs. HDFS2) and more servers because of the failure rates of whitebox servers.

In fact, Hadoop data center admins spend most of their time replacing whitebox servers or hard drives. When a drive fails, the entire node does go offline, but the typical Hadoop cluster can still operate. However, that copy of the data and processing power of the failed node isn’t available, impacting the efficiency of the system.

That’s fine for these internet giants who can hire some cheap Stanford Ph.D. students to do the grunt work of running around the data center to replace parts constantly. Their model works.  However, that’s not how enterprise data centers operate in the federal world. Come back next week, and I’ll tell you about the benefits of shared architecture with Hadoop and how to avoid the Google syndrome. Until then, feel free to jpbergeaux@swishdata.com, or leave feedback on Facebook and Twitter.

As it turns out, we have a unique ability here at SwishData to architect, engineer and implement data solutions that are a perfect fit for agencies that need a one-stop shop for deployment systems with speed and agility. I’ve heard some great customer stories lately about agencies that operate abroad and need a partner who can remove the complexity associated with having multiple vendors in intense environments — it’s a mission only SwishData excels at accomplishing.

Meeting mission challenges

When agencies need help addressing mission-critical data issues, we answer the call around the globe. Often, customers have a wide selection of storage but are not able to meet expectations for data sharing, disaster recovery, continuity of operations or long-term backup retention — all of this is even tougher when you’re expected to be highly mobile and reactive to the operational environment. Do you have difficulty accessing data from forward deployed areas? Is your data recovery anything but rapid? Those are unacceptable propositions for rapidly deployable forces, and it’s exactly what one customer faced.

Data mobility for the highly mobile

Our expertise with design, implementation and support — offering the complete package from architecture to engineering and through deployment — is a definitive factor in the success of the solutions we recommend for government agencies like the customer I mentioned above. In that case, to address those challenges to making data highly mobile and accessible, we designed a solution that included storage consolidation, data replication and data protection using software that integrated with storage array functionality and network optimization to improve data sharing. Our consultants actually worked in the field with the customer to determine requirements and meet the mission.

SwishData’s work eliminated data sprawl for file services, VMware, Exchange and application services. The final result was 50 percent less storage utilization. SwishData deployed a NetApp storage environment, NetApp Snap Manager, Syncsort Data Protection Software and Riverbed, offering integrated and protected storage, and reducing the amount of physical equipment needed across the organization.

Now that agency’s data is always ready. Admins can recover data within minutes instead of hours or days. Their data center is mobile, capable of shutdown and startup somewhere else within minutes to continuously support the mission. Before SwishData stepped in, that wasn’t the case.

Need a similar fix? Want to know more? jpbergeaux@swishdata.com or look us up on Facebook and Twitter.

Stop thinking about data protection last.

I’ve read so much lately on cloud-delivered apps, data center consolidation and virtual desktops — all relevant, hot IT topics. However, focusing solely on those topics is a bit like trying to run a halfback pass in football before you’ve learned how to properly hand off the ball. In other words, before you master trick plays like transitioning to the cloud or virtual desktops, you can’t forget something as fundamental to your architecture as data protection. If you want to avoid falling flat on your face, you need to walk before you run.

Too often, data protection is an afterthought. And many times, people focus on the wrong concepts — to a lot of people, data protection just means having backups. But think about this: Isn’t how quickly you can access that backed up data what really matters in the event of an IT failure or physical disaster? That means the most salient part of data protection is restores. More on that here.

Many organizations are starting to rely on technologies like Snapshots, as they should, for temporary data protection with little production impact. Unfortunately, some are relying completely on these technologies as though they are the whole solution. They’re not! In this post, I described the different functions of a complete data management strategy, and snapshots are only part of the picture. Why do IT professionals do this? The answer is simple: Backups and backup windows can be a major pain. 

Luckily, Syncsort is here to save the day, with a little help from NetApp. The NetApp Syncsort Integrated Backup solution (or, NSB) allows users to recover data within minutes. This solution allows for Syncsort to backup any heterogeneous storage-based servers with a very low-impact backup. All it takes is a few clicks from an admin to restore an entire server, volume or individual file. And I should note NSB also offers advanced VMware recovery capabilities.

Service outages matter in a 24-7 operational environment

When I wrote about NSB before, Syncsort’s Peter Eicher commented and used the great example of RIM’s infamous BlackBerry outage. Had service been disrupted for 15 minutes, complaints would have been minor. But an hours-long outage results in irate customers. Any longer, and you’re left looking for new customers. When you translate this example to government, the consequences become even more significant. What if the mission — maybe even lives — depends on access to data? What if hours, as opposed to minutes, to restore data means the mission is compromised?

NSB can deliver a combination of 95-percent faster backups, 95-percent VM backup impact reduction and 99.99-percent backup success rates, all while using 90-percent less storage. But that’s not what’s really impressive or important about what NSB can do. Remember, restores, and fast ones, are what matters in this 24-7 world we live in. The story of RIM’s outage wasn’t about lost data — it was about how long it took to restore service. NSB has the ability to restore any backup as a virtual machine, almost eliminating the restore window entirely by directly mounting a backup image and using it immediately. Instead of hours to restore a disk or entire system, it takes minutes or less. 

Planning for data backup and recovery is a critical part of any federal IT process. Not an afterthought. It’s a vital element of your game plan. Mitigate risk and focus more on the mission instead of worrying about the ‘what ifs?’ Make backup a priority.

We can help you make backup a priority. Contact me  to discuss seeing a demo of NSB in action. Or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.

Is your agency faced with a need to streamline data storage now? Do you have an urgent need to acquire more storage before operations are affected?

Many of our customers experience these mission-threatening challenges and deal with multiple storage arrays that span different technologies and silos of storage. The maintenance bills really add up.

We can help you determine your ideal solution

SwishData offers assessments to government agencies that are looking for new ways to solve issues inside the data center. For many agencies, we’re able to determine that savings can be found by restructuring the storage architecture’s design and solutions. Often, after providing these assessments, we’re ready to deploy quickly if you decide to come to us later to implement the solution because we’ve already taken the time to understand your pain points. You don’t need to deal with a lot of ramp-up time when important work is on the line.

Stop putting work on the backburner because of ongoing maintenance

The outcome of one recent SwishData project was that we were able to take a government agency from four silos to one consolidated enterprise storage array built on NetApp, which reduced the carbon footprint of the storage system by minimizing energy use by 50 percent. The agency, like yours might, also had many important IT projects on the backburner because personnel resources had to be utilized for maintenance. Now, there is time to do more new work, and a foundation for disaster recovery and continuity of operations is in place.

Intrigued? Email me at jpbergeaux@swishdata.com, or connect with us on Twitter and Facebook.

Image courtesy Flickr user LeSimonPix

You could be doing a lot more with a lot less. Now there’s a way to find out how much you could be saving — real money, along with significant time and environmental impact savings.

I want to share a tool with you that’s new to the SwishData website. You may have noticed it in our rotating carousel on the homepage, but if not you can try it here. With data growing at more than 30 percent each year on average, and storage budgets growing at only 3 percent a year, something has to give — especially when analysts estimate storage consumes 23 percent of the average IT budget. This new tool, will help you calculate how efficient you can be with your data requirements.

Storage impacts everything

Something I try to remind people about all the time is that storage doesn’t just impact the data capacity your agency needs to purchase. It affects everything: physical space, power and cooling energy needs and even hours to manage and maintain. If you have a system that not only is more efficient for storing your data, but also that addresses all these other issues, the savings really start to add up.

How much? It’s going to vary by situation, but NetApp guarantees you’ll use 50 percent less storage by switching to them from traditional storage, and you can determine your actual savings by using the Efficient IT Calculator.

Less equipment means less floor space, and it also means the system won’t take as much energy to power and keep cool. And because of the reliability and data protection features of NetApp storage, management and maintenance is not a hassle. This hardware helps minimize risk and downtime.

What have you got to lose?

In about 30 seconds, you can complete the three easy steps on one screen that it takes to calculate your potential savings. That’s half a minute to potentially save millions. Sounds like a good investment, right?

Give it a try. Take the Efficient IT challenge.

I was thinking about the state of the Federal Cloud First Policy seven months after the departure of its champion-in-chief, Vivek Kundra, when I came across an interesting article.

According to a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute, many agencies still have significant reservations about moving essential information and functions to the cloud. According to the poll, nearly half of respondents indicated that worries about security were the primary factor keeping them from fully migrating to the cloud. 

Here’s what’s interesting: Conventional wisdom points to security as the big stumbling block for cloud adoption. But a large percentage of those surveyed indicated they weren’t very confident about the cost savings promised by the cloud either, while others cited the lack of applications or services available as their reason for not moving to the cloud.

Specifically looking at the highly touted cost savings of the external cloud mandate, some 73 percent of IT respondents were either unsure or not confident that they had an understanding of the long-term impact of moving to an external cloud. Even more troubling, was that of those that did think they knew, roughly three-fourths of IT respondents thought it would have no, or a negative, impact on cost.

So it’s not just security, but the basic benefits of the cloud that are in doubt.

Agencies will only migrate when assurances outweigh doubts

Many organizations have not moved beyond the first stage of compliance: simply identifying applications that could be moved to the cloud.

Obviously, unless cloud providers can allay all of these fears and concerns, thinking about moving to the cloud is likely to be as close as many organizations will come to realizing and trusting its potential.

In fact, I would wager that until more cloud providers offer cost-saving and security guarantees, cloud computing will remain a conversation, and not a revolution, in IT.

The key is protecting your budget, as well as systems and data

What’s sure though is that the current 37-percent level of server virtualization in the federal government is a great place to start saving money. Just bringing that to 50 or 60 percent will make great cost savings headway for cash-strapped agencies. Not only can virtualization itself save cost, but also using companies like NetApp can make those savings even more impactful. NetApp offers guarantees of 50 percent savings in storage usage in a virtualized environment.

Some key features we can offer to your internal cloud, built on NetApp, VMware and Riverbed, are:

• Business agility with reduced capital costs
• Meet enterprise service-level agreements
• Comprehensive ecosystem allows global access to a full range of cloud services
• Future-ready solutions that can leverage future innovation

From a cost perspective, NetApp guarantees that— with its unified architecture and storage efficiency technology — it will reduce your storage utilization by 50 percent or more. Plus, using VMware’s industry leading virtualization solution can bring features like vCloud to the table that offer a ready-to-go cloud management interface for the infrastructure administrators, as well as the departments themselves.

From a security standpoint, NetApp offers application isolation by providing dedicated, secluded hardware. VMware’s virtualization offers the best VM security protections in the industry, so government agencies can increase security, efficiency and savings by simply moving more applications to an internal cloud infrastructure.

SwishData clears the haze of concerns surrounding the cloud

SwishData works integrally with the partners we support as an equal stakeholder. Our engineers are as well-versed in all the technologies we provide (and the missions they support) as the manufacturers are. 

Together, we offer solutions that are tailored to the specific goals and unique needs of each customer. Nowhere is that more evident than in the security and cost saving guarantees we stand behind. 

It’s because nothing matters more to us than what matters to you.

Are you facing these same challenges? What cloud concerns do you face at your agency? Let us know on Twitter and or on Facebook!

Image from Baltic Development Group via Creative Commons (attribution) on Flickr.

If there’s one thing the U.S. government is abundantly wealthy in (in addition to dedicated IT professionals like you) — it’s data. 

And because the U.S. is the world’s largest producer and consumer of data, it also has the most to gain from this untapped potential.

The Wikipedia entry on big data says it consists of datasets grown so large they become awkward to work with using typical database management tools. By that definition, it’s clear that government really is the world’s first (and largest) big data customer.

It’s like striking gold

For those who can tap into big data's immense potential, the rewards can be substantial — a veritable treasure trove at a time when agencies are being tasked to do more with less. Agencies can’t risk missing emerging opportunities. Or potentially catastrophic, emerging threats.  

Transformative results in real-time

Harnessing big data can help you see and make sense of hidden correlations within data to pinpoint trends, patterns and relationships — helping you make critical decisions in real-time that used to be the stuff of hindsight.

Big data offers three key benefits:

1. Visibility — allows you to paint a more accurate picture of the environment around you and your mission at hand

2. Insight and precision — defines very clearly enormous amounts of data, zeroing in on trends, and highlighting potential pitfalls

3. Dissemination — makes it easy and convenient to provide stakeholders with concise analysis in a format that is customizable and easy to digest

The trick lies in harnessing all that data and translating its potential into real and actionable intelligence. Which is why I believe NetApp is such a smart choice. NetApp does big data extremely well.

NetApp’s E-series solutions offer users who need to manage lots of data and lots of storage for everything from real-time streaming video and signal analysis to supercomputing unprecedented versatility and agility when it comes to capturing, pinpointing and capitalizing on the trends and kernels of opportunity hidden within.

What sets NetApp apart is what they’ve termed the ABCs of big data (Analytics, Bandwidth and Capacity):

Analytics

NetApp’s powerful open solution Hadoop analytics allows you to crunch unprecedented volumes of data at breakneck speed — and make sense of it all in a way relational databases and business intelligence never could.

Bandwidth

New bandwidth efficiencies break through historic performance barriers, performing complex data-intensive analyses at extremely high speeds — promising better performance for very fast workloads like high-performance video streaming for surveillance and mission planning, high-performance computing, and bandwidth-intensive video editing.

Capacity

NetApp’s solution provides boundless, secure and scalable data storage that can be added to or altered at any time, without disrupting your flow of analytics —letting you readily add extra storage without adding extra CPUs.

Not simply a data solution: A data solution specifically tailored to you

SwishData maintains an expert-level knowledge of the technologies we offer and the partners we support. Our knowledge of NetApp and the solutions it provides is thorough and complete. But more than technology and components, our engineers understand the intricacies of your mission and the challenges you face and the goals you seek to achieve. Together, these capabilities mean we are able to go far beyond simply offering just a data solution — but your data solution.

When you Google the combination of “SharePoint” and “Federal Government,” the hits you don’t get are much more interesting than those you do. I tried it recently and as you might expect, the results were teeming with sales and recruitment promos.

What I didn’t see was much insight shedding light on perhaps the biggest challenge in the SharePoint space: performance.

Want more in-depth knowledge? Download our SharePoint solution brief.

Expectations are exceeding capabilities

SharePoint is falling victim to its own success. In one of their blogs, our colleagues at Riverbed point out that SharePoint is exploding like a rocket in terms of deployments. But as it does, it often fails to deliver a rocket-fast user experience—especially to remote sites.

Even when SharePoint servers, storage, and network environments are well-managed, performance frequently pales in comparison to the speeds users expect from powerful websites and applications. Often, other essential capabilities (such as backup and restore) are very limited.

Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work (even if it were practical)

When standard solutions don’t work, no amount of capital, technology and manpower will produce better results. At SwishData Corporation, we knew we needed a breakthrough approach. We found it in a combination of technologies that delivers SharePoint performance without a heavy investment of resources.

The result is an innovative tool that significantly improves user experience at the front end of a SharePoint environment by:

• Boosting response times by 400 percent with a software-only solution
• Accelerating performance across single or multiple servers without reconfigurations or administrative changes

It also enhances performance at the back end by integrating products from multiple vendors to:

• Cut recovery times by 95 percent
• Reduce backup times by 90 percent
• Provide a 99-percent success rate within backup windows
• Achieve recovery point and time objectives that were previously impossible

The key to this solution is that it’s low-risk, both for budgets and operations. Because we don’t need to reconfigure servers, add expensive hardware, or make administrative changes, we minimize both the cost and the chance of disruptions. All users will see is performance that meets their most demanding expectations.

Download SwishData's SharePoint solution brief now!