A PDF of the NIH Contract Guide  can be downloaded on the GCN website at the bottom of the page.

Govplace recently held a webinar on using modern mainframe tape solutions to cut costs & increase efficiencies.

The webinar was exclusively for public sector employees, and was presented by Dave Race, Govplace Solutions Architect & Author of the series, “Mainframe Disaster Recovery without Tapes” on the Govplace Blog.

Registrants learned:

• Cost effectiveness of implementing a mainframe VTL solution.
• Why tape is no longer measuring up.
• Solutions for all mainframe tape use.
• How channel gateways are robust.
• Leveraging mainframe data deduplication.
• Customer examples & case study.

If you would like more information about mainframe virtual tape solutions, please call 888.308.8802 x3 or email Sales@govplace.com.

Ryan McCullough

Ryan McCullough, VP of the Federal Division of Govplace recently appeared on the 1500 AM radio show, In Depth with Francis Rose.

On the radio show, McCullough stated that collaborations between agencies and vendors is increasing, which will ultimately benefit agencies, who will see better contracting.

“I think we are seeing a trend there that’s obviously faster there than at some other [agencies],” Ryan says. “There are a number of groups that are engaging the same kind of strategy that GSA has been talking about. Where I think we’re seeing less of it is on the task order side – the things that are a specific mission requirement being addressed.”

Additional issues discussed  includes cloud computing, data center consolidation, and communication between industry and government.

For more information, and to listen to the audio, go to the 1500 AM In Depth website.

The rankings are compiled from contract award information made available by the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), the government agency that monitors data on millions of government contractual actions each year.

Govplace’s focus on delivering comprehensive integrated IT solutions, which are tied to customer’s mission performance metrics, contributes to the company’s continued success and definitive return on investment that the government demands.

The complete list is located at http://www.gsnmagazine.com/article/19800/familiar_faces_populate_pinnacle_top_100.

There were 120 golfers from several federal agencies and manufacturer partner companies who participated in this charitable event.  Proceeds from this year’s golf tournament will be donated to two worthy causes- The Armed Forces Foundation and The Children’s Inn at the National Institute of Health (NIH).

The Armed Forces Foundation is a non-profit organization whose charter is to provide assistance to members of the military community and their families – such as medical bills, legal fees, housing and bereavement assistance.

The Children’s Inn at The National Institute of Health (NIH) is a residential “home away from home” for sick children and their families. Children and their families stay at the Inn while receiving medical treatments, the world’s leading biomedical research center. The Children’s Inn provides a fun, healing environment for everyone.

Generous golfers donated 3 large bins of non-perishable food for The Children’s Inn, and purchased mulligans and 50/50 raffle tickets, with proceeds being donated to the two worthy causes.

After registration and a continental breakfast, golfers played a scramble format at the recently completed golf course. After golfing, attendees were treated to a few words by Adam Robinson, CEO of Govplace, Kathy Russell from Children’s Inn at NIH and James Fenlon from the Armed Forces Foundation.

During the awards ceremony, the winning foursome comprised of Brian Kelley, Jerry Dowell, Brett Pfrommer and Don Elhussen received a new golf bag and a free round of golf at 1757 Golf Club. Second place winners, Scott Beard, Jeff Kavulik, KC Cook and Scott Hopkins received gift certificates from Golf Galaxy as well as a prize bag.  The Longest Drive winner, Dan Nobleman and the Closest to the Pin winner, Mike Downey, received new golf clubs. 

Thank you to all of our sponsors for making this year’s tournament another success: CDW-G, Access Data, Ingram Micro, McAfee, Absolute Software, Quest Software, CACI, carahsoft, Guerra Kiviat, Inc., HP, IntelliDyne, Intelligent Decisions, NetApp, QualTech and TWD. 

Click on the thumbnails to see the full size images.

Ryan McCullough

Ryan McCullough, VP of Federal Sales for Govplace, was recently featured on In Depth with Francis Rose on 1500 AM Federal News Radio.

McCullough discussed performance-based contracting, and how this changes the way agencies, and in turn, vendors do business.

To hear about the importance of agencies setting up measures for success on a contract, “blurring the lines” between prime and subcontractors, and addressing objections to cloud computing and data center consolidation, go here.

Dan Smith

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed some of the semantics and high-level definitions around cloud computing.  We also talked about cloud computing having five key characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models.  While the first Part of this series discussed the five key characteristics seen in typical cloud deployments, Part 2 will focus on the three delivery models, with special attention paid to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  These three delivery models consist of:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS),
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) and
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

As discussed earlier, these delivery models are often confused, so we’ll attempt to set the record straight on what each offering is supposed to provide, and tie in some examples of real-life use.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

With SaaS, consumers of the service access and use applications running on a cloud infrastructure on various client devices through an interface such as a web browser.  These interface methods may also be a smartphone, ebook reader, or car navigation system – virtually any device that is connected to the internet.  In a SaaS environment, consumers do not manage or control the underlying infrastructure, network, servers, operating systems, storage, or application capabilities, with the exception of some app configuration settings.  

Most of us use SaaS on a regular basis without even recognizing it.  Some examples of typical SaaS offerings are things like web-based email through Outlook Web Access, Gmail, Yahoo or MSN Mail, Salesforce.com and many others.  Recently, some major SaaS providers have started putting much more sophisticated apps in the “cloud” – apps such as ERP and CRM systems, as well as Microsoft’s SharePoint and other collaboration tools.  For many organizations, the ability to tie in and utilize a SaaS-based model for their applications can be a great way of getting up quickly on an application managed by someone else, while really minimizing startup and administrative costs. 

For some enterprises, however, the drawback to SaaS applications is typically the level of customization they are able to have with the applications themselves.  SaaS providers typically offer their applications with limited customization to keep service levels and user experience levels high, as well as reduce the amount of overhead and administrative work they themselves have to perform to keep services running well.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

For enterprises that require that higher level of customization, while still desiring their application be hosted in the cloud, PaaS can be a real enabler.  With PaaS, consumers deploy their apps onto hosted cloud infrastructure using programming languages and tools supported by the provider (e.g., java, python, .Net).   In this environment, consumers do not manage or control the cloud infrastructure, network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but do have nearly complete control over their apps and hosting environment configurations.

PaaS is a bit younger and as such, is seeing adoption grow at a quicker rate.  PaaS is typically gaining ground from two different customer bases – those who adopted SaaS early on and are seeking the ability to have higher levels of customization in their applications, and those who are looking to deploy new applications, but need the flexibility and granularity of control that comes along with a hosted platform.  Some examples of PaaS environments are offerings from some of the industry leaders such as Salesforce.com with their Force.com environment, Google’s App Engine, Microsoft Azure Services Platform and Amazon Web Services.  There are a number of startups and smaller providers in this space as well, and for good development environments, PaaS shows promise as a great way to host and develop applications in the cloud without having to maintain your own infrastructure. 

PaaS environments typically have other “value added” capabilities that facilitate the development cycle such as testing tools, collaboration tools, and versioning and community facilitation.  Again, these offerings can be attractive to many smaller development environments as they provide capabilities that would be expensive and time consuming to stand up themselves.  

That being said, as we discussed with SaaS, the potential drawback comes from the “bottom of the stack” – limited customization.  With PaaS, the same is true: while the outsourced/hosted development environment can be a huge value to many organizations, its underlying infrastructure and the services it provides are the responsibility of the PaaS provider.  This means that whether the costs or service levels are discrete or not, PaaS customers will be paying for the infrastructure they consume, and have little control over things like hardware standards, system availability, scalability and performance.  For most environments, this handoff of control to an external provider is just what they’re looking for.  I can’t tell you how many of our clients have told us they want to “get out of the hardware business.”  However, for many larger environments, outsourcing that much control of their infrastructure just doesn’t fit their needs across the organization, so while PaaS may be used to some extent, most of their infrastructure will remain in-house. 

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

As we stated earlier, IaaS is the real focus of this conversation.  With IaaS, consumers rent processing, storage, network and other computing resources where they are able to deploy and run arbitrary software, including OS and applications.  In this environment, consumers do not manage or control the hosting infrastructure, but have control over their OS, data, apps, and select networking components.  A user’s interface with an IaaS provider is typically a web-based “control panel” where they can access their infrastructure services, get console-level access to their managed devices, and pretty much anything else they’d be able to do in their own data center. 

Since bare-metal infrastructure is one of the biggest physical assets in most data centers, it’s been one of the slower cloud computing delivery models to really take hold – but that’s starting to change.  Specifically in the public sector, many smaller organizations have found it difficult to drive the economies of scale needed to realize the benefits of IT consolidation at a higher level.  They’re often stuck with smaller projects such as a server, network, or storage consolidation effort to drive down costs.  To answer this challenge, many of the cabinet-level and other larger government agencies have been building large, centrally consolidated data centers to host applications across the enterprise.  While there are public cloud providers such as Amazon with EC2, and hybrid/community cloud providers such as DISA with the RACE program, many organizations are simply more comfortable with an internal or “private” cloud hosting environment. 

Typical IaaS programs internal to a data center consist of a number of building blocks, including:

Data Center Infrastructure

Consisting of power, cooling, battery backup, racks and environmental monitoring, as well as physical security.  For “Greenfield” environments, this is often one of the most expensive fixed costs.  The effort and cost required to build or modernize a data center can be astronomical, but at the same time, can be one of the biggest sources of efficiency in the long-term.  That being said, ROI from a physical data center modernization typically doesn’t show up for many years.  Plan on sinking some good cost here and having it payoff 5-7 years down the road.  Data center infrastructure, since it is an underlying foundation for everything else, is not discretely billed to customers, but some customers in an IaaS environment may be charged for their power consumption (which includes the cost to power the cooling systems).  This can help the IaaS provider to offset their power and cooling costs as well as some of the data center modernization costs, and can help drive IaaS consumers to lower their power utilization through virtualization and better workload management.

Networks

IaaS Network Infrastructure includes all the elements you would expect, including routing and switching, intelligent load balancing, traffic optimization and application awareness.  Most mid-size to large data centers are extending the standard network presence down to the rack level by providing high-speed top-of-rack switching for both IP and Fibre Channel connectivity.  Network environments and devices, since they support multiple tenants in this shared environment, are typically not discretely billed back to their consumers, but rather rolled into the cost foundation of the server and storage components of the architecture.

Storage

Storage is typically deployed now in multiple tiers to accommodate data with different lifecycle and performance/availability requirements.  This might consist of a highest-speed Solid State Disk (SSD) tier, a high-speed Fibre Channel disk tier, a mid-level SATA Tier, and an near-line high-speed tape or lower-speed SATA disk tier.  Each of these tiers has its own level of availability and performance service levels, and is typically priced on a “per Gigabyte (GB) per month” basis, allowing users to subscribe for planned usage or be billed after the fact for actual usage of the storage environment.

Servers

Although IaaS Server Infrastructure is usually reserved for Open Systems, mainframes have been thrown into the mix a number of times to satisfy legacy computing requirements.  The Open Systems x86 and RISC-based platforms are leveraging hypervisors and sophisticated resource management tools to maximize individual system utilization, and have grown more intelligent so that many of them often know the “best place” to run an application.  In these scenarios, the hypervisors or resource management tools will actually relocate workloads “in real time” to another server platform without them needing to be taken offline.  This benefits the service provider by making workloads portable and their infrastructure more sharable for multiple tenants, and benefits consumers by ensuring their workloads hit the promised service levels.  Server infrastructure is either subscribed to on a “per server per month” basis, with different offerings for different classes of virtual servers, or billed against a consumer’s actual utilization of resources such as CPUs, memory, network and storage. 

Systems Management

Managing a multi-tenant environment requires a good tool set for monitoring and managing the environment itself as well as networks, servers, storage and applications.  While basic monitoring tools will get certain aspects of the job done, IaaS providers typically leverage high-end tools to reduce to increase the intelligence of the environment and keep the cost of systems administration and hands-on management to a minimum.  With most modern management tools, routine processes and workflows can be scripted to take advantage of sophisticated automation capabilities and shorten the amount of time needed to perform regular maintenance activities.  Since systems management tools serve multiple customers just like the data center infrastructure itself and the network infrastructure, it typically gets paid for out of a common pool and is a component of each consumer’s price.  Consumers may find themselves paying directly for management agents on their IaaS provided systems if they want a higher degree of information from their systems such as application monitoring or other system-specific data.

Information Security

One of the primary reasons for not moving into a shared or multi-tenant environment has been information security.  Prospective consumers of IaaS environments are frequently concerned that with someone else managing security, their risk increases, and their ability to manage that risk decreases.  To compensate for this perceived risk, many IaaS providers have made significant investments in processes and tools to support asset management, log management, vulnerability management and remediation, as well as intrusion detection and prevention systems and network forensics.  By implementing these tools around individual consumer’s processes and requirements, IaaS providers today can accommodate even the most strict information security requirements while still keeping their costs low.  As with systems management capabilities, information security costs from IaaS providers are typically built into their individual service offerings. 

In Closing…

Standing up an environment that provides this collection of capabilities, then reducing the costs down to some sort of “per unit” service charge can be an absolute nightmare.  The complexity and sophistication that goes into the pricing and service levels is nothing short of insane in most cases.  Part 4 of this series will discuss how to understand (and limit) your organization’s requirements, and how to do so in a way that helps to prescribe the underlying components of the infrastructure to best communicate your requirements to potential IaaS providers.

Our next discussion (Part 3), will focus on the four deployment models for Cloud Computing, and how to identify the best fit for your environment.  Since most of our clients fit best into one specific deployment, the private cloud, we will spend the bulk of the conversation there, and discussing how to best start discussions with a private cloud provider.

Over the next several weeks, I will discuss the remaining 5 parts in this series on cloud computing.

Part 3 – Cloud Computing Deployment Models

Part 4 – Understanding (and Limiting) Your Organization’s Requirements

Part 5 – Building the Private Cloud

Part 6 – Managing Cloud Services

Part 7 – Adding Services to the Cloud

What are your thoughts on the series so far?

Dan Smith

Govplace Dirctor of Professional Services

Damon Brown, CTO of Govplace

In part 1 of “Desktop Virtualization Cultural Challenges”, I discussed the need to consider user experience and perspective of technology.  The greatest technology in the world that fails to be adopted by the end user is a failed technology. Today, technology is pervasive in many individual’s personal and business lives. The kind of cell phone you carry, whether you are a MAC or PC user, can be a as much of a personal statement as the clothes you wear or the car you drive. Computer-based workers spend a large, if not the largest, portion of their waking day staring at a screen. Workers personalize their work area and computer desktops to fit their needs and individual tastes, making them an extension of their own personality.

Virtualized desktops, regardless of vendor, take advantage of  shared resources. Sharing these capital intensive resources is a large element of its value.  The ability to rapidly provision hundreds of desktops from a single image also has huge benefits. Turning the desktop into a “service” that is provided by IT rather than a capital asset that requires arduous management has an enormous impact on the bottom line.

Any time you mass produce, centrally manage and standardize, there is an reduction of the uniqueness and individuality of the product (desktop). Every desktop ceases to be unique, like a special snowflake. This is good for managing, troubleshooting, cost control, security and reliability. Reduction in customization can potentially be perceived as being negative by the end user. Give back my snowflake!

I see the path through this challenge comprised of three components: executive sponsorship, user experience centric approach and proper deployment.

Executive Sponsorship:
Desktop Virtualization is not solely an IT initiative. Leadership needs to understand both the financial benefits and social pitfalls of this venture. They need to work with management and staff alike to help them understand why this move is good for the organization and ultimately the individual. Understand that a small sacrifice in computer interface customization will ultimately provide a much more stable environment. Also, sell new capabilities, such as quick application provisioning and access to those applications from anywhere, anytime to get the organization excited. It is the leadership’s responsibility to sell the change as a good change for everyone. Leadership also has the responsibility to enable the IT organization to be successful. This may mean empowering the team, or merely backing them up when decisions are made that some users may be unhappy with, but are for the greater good of the organization. IT and the executive teams must stand as one in a change such as this.

User Experience Centric Approach:
From initial design to implementation, leadership and IT alike must recognize that IT is responsible for a good end user experience. IT staff can get excited about taking capabilities away from end users that will benefit system stability. For example, removing the ability to install applications, or making desktops read only altogether, gets IT cheering. We need to take a balanced approach between system lockdown and end user flexibility. All too often, IT sees users as the problem rather than the customer. The user is the reason for IT’s existence. Again, leadership plays a critical role here.

Proper deployment:
The solution better work, or no amount of selling will keep you out if the line of fire. Use experienced, qualified people. Make sure that your integrator not only understands the technology, but the concepts within this article. To insure your success, work with professionals that are willing to sign up for measurements of success beyond the technology. Hold them accountable to the outcome of the overall initiative.  Whenever possible, use vendor agnostic solution providers. You will get an unbiased approach to the solution that combines best of breed technologies from various vendors if necessary. Make sure the architecture takes into consideration the entire “computer stack”. These solutions can rely heavily on other parts of your infrastructure, such as networking, storage and even helpdesk. Train your people. Once the architecture is identified, with send your team to training or build training into the implementation process. Build on a foundation of quality infrastructure, properly deployed, adhering to best practices, managed knowledgeable IT staff. Invest in the right 3rd party tools, training, updating processes and procedures, sell the solution internally, and you will have a happy and productive organization.

VDI Survey
Xangati, developers of a solution which allows service providers and IT organizations to eliminate blind spots from their network infrastructure, recently conducted a survey to assess Desktop Virtualization in 2010.

Download the entire survey & results here.

Some of the survey questions and results are:

What are the top drivers moving your organization towards VDI?

• Reducing cost of operations/lower TCO – 76.5%
• Increased security to prevent/deter theft of IP – 31.4%
• Increasing of employee productivity – 28.4%
• Green initiative – 28.4%
• Cloud initiative – 27.5%
• Compliance – 12.7%
• Windows 7 migration costs – 12.7%
• Other – 12.7%

What factors were/will be evaluated to determine success of the VDI pilot? (Please select more than one if appropriate)

• End-user experience/satisfaction – 83.3%
• Critical business apps worked as expected – 71.6%
• Cost of pilot (were deployment and support costs higher/lower than expected) – 52.9%
• No intended consequences for other parts of the IT experience – 37.3%
• Ease of pilot deployment (extent to which project varied/varies from schedule) – 35.3
• Other – 3.9%

What do you see as likely obstacles to full scale VDI deployment? (Please select more than one if appropriate)

• Lack of management solutions for VDI performance/visibility – 63.7%
• Hidden costs/overall VDI deployment costs – 39.2%
• Not enough resources allocated to project (people, dollars, hardware, software) – 33.3%
• Network infrastructure performance/readiness – 31.4%
• Adapting IT operations processes to support VDI end-users – 26.5%
• Lack of management solutions for VDI performance/visibility – 16.7%
• Need for an IT chargeback model – 15.7%
• Other – 10.8%

Which of these functions do you expect a management solution to provide in your VDI deployments? (Please select more than one if appropriate)

• Assess what adversely affecting end-user experience – 62.7%
• Tell me what isn’t working – 52.0%
• Enable service desk to support end-user VDI calls – 42.2%
• Provide insight into infrastructure’s readiness to support VDI – 40.2%
• Help avoid pitfalls that delay project timelines – 35.3%
• Deliver proactive service assurance for VDI 34.3%

Do you believe that 2010 is the watershed year for VDI?

• Yes – 65.7%
• No – 34.3%

Damon Brown, CTO of Govplace

The technology of desktop virtualization (VDI) is maturing rapidly and offering tremendous efficiencies.  Many times during conversations with other IT leaders, I refer to it as finally “mature for the masses”. But as we all know, successful IT initiatives are more about the people and processes than about the technology. I have found that desktop virtualization initiatives are highly susceptible to the people, processes, and culture surrounding the project.

A significant factor to consider when working with a VDI project is how users perceive the desktop they work with day after day. Specifically, the world inside the machine.  A user’s desktop icons, color scheme, and background wallpaper, etcetera are often a very personal thing. We all spend so much time working at our desks, on our computers that we begin to build a connection with this world and it becomes a part of who we are. We decorate our cubes and offices to our personal liking, to show a part of who we are. The personal computer, and its personalization, is no different.

Now, take into consideration where VDI derives its value to the organization from. With VDI, we gain enormous efficiencies over management and operations of the desktop environment. This equates to significant savings for the organization. Information Technology now has the ability to take the layers of the desktop (operating system, applications, and user data) and bring them into the datacenter. We can regain control over the disorder the traditional desktop infrastructure has become.

Whenever control or power is shifted, the people losing the control can often feel slighted. This feeling, combined with a sense of ownership a user has over their pc as their personal space, may make users emotionally equate losing the ability for desktop pc customization to the company forbidding any personal decorations in their working environment.

Without properly preparing for these challenges, you may end up with a wonderful technology that is not only ill adopted, but outright resisted.

In my next post  I will share my thoughts on dealing with cultural challenges.

For many government organizations, the question of whether or not to move into cloud computing has already been answered, and that answer has been “Yes.”  For most, the first step into the cloud is by virtualizing their server hardware through the use of hypervisors.  In this session, Dan Smith will detail the variations of cloud computing being adopted today, and will discuss the possible exploits and security concerns of each, as well as some common approaches to managing risk.

Additionally, Govplace will be exhibiting at booth # 123.

Government employees can attend the presentation and exhibition for free if they register online.

For conference information and registration.  http://1105govinfoevents.com/EventOverview.aspx?Event=SEC09

Come join us at the Security Conference and learn about securing cloud environments.