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The challenges facing government IT professionals are, in many respects, the same challenges faced by all IT pros, with the additional stresses of citizens and various constituencies (not to mention open-access laws and regulations) thrown into the mix. When a community decides that it's time to upgrade its computing infrastructure, it can become a long-term project with many different goals and targets to be met along the way. That's the experience of the city of Brookline, Massachusetts, a community of about 60,000 just outside Boston that began a path toward virtual servers and storage about three years ago.

Kevin Stokes is CIO for the town and public schools of Brookline. He says that the process of looking at the overall architecture in the city's strategic planning led directly to consideration of server virtualization as part of the strategy for how the IT group would get there.

Stokes says that he didn't begin the process with an understanding of storage as a strategic piece of the infrastructure. "I'll admit that I started out thinking of storage as a commodity, and I didn't appreciate it as a strategic part of the vision. We found, through some unfortunate situations where we lost some key data, that not all storage is created equal," he says.

Brookline had been using EMC storage branded by Dell since 2002, but the IT group didn't see the products as a long-term direction for the city.  Ultimately, the Brookline IT folks decided to stay with EMC, but chose the Clariion CX4 family of mid-range storage products for their needs. Stokes says that the CX4 units they considered were actually on the small size for the anticipated storage needs of the city, but that the features and capabilities of the CX4 met the priorities of the new architecture.

After considering many different options and carefully designing a new architecture, the project could get underway. Stokes says, "We really started virtualization in January of 08. In the building blocks we had there were a lot of storage needs, and the virtualization made it obvious that we needed a robust and resilient storage solution. We've consolidated north of fifty servers down to thirteen blades and about fifty virtual servers. From where I sit storage sits at the center of virtualization." He says that he considers Brookline fortunate in that the city has the resources to act on the understanding of storage's importance to the newly-virtual environment -- it all came down to the budget.

Stokes understands that Brookline sits in the middle of a highly-fashionable flavor of computing right now. "Virtualization is booming everywhere you go, and storage is a key part of that," he says.

Brookline has been able to execute the biggest part of their revised IT strategy, Stokes says, largely through the efforts of professional services partnerships. "We worked closely with a local reseller to make sure the architecture was right. You want to think it through before you start making purchases. We worked with Focus Technologies, a local group that resells EMC to help us put a stake in the ground and get going," he explains. Stokes points out that there were others consultants and integrators involved in the project, but considers Focus Technologies the primary partner, though he also credits EMC Global Services for their role in the implementation, providing initial analysis of the town's environment and assisting with design and implementation of the new Clariion infrastructure.

To manage the volume of information and complexity of its applications, the town consolidated its disparate storage residing on an EMC Clariion CX3 and 45 HP servers onto an EMC Clariion CX4 networked storage system for financial management, email, Microsoft SQL Server, geographic information systems (GIS), energy management, Microsoft Office and school administration.  This system is managed, monitored and configured using EMC Navisphere software.

When asked about where Brookline is in the overall implementation of the full IT strategy, Stokes pauses. "Certainly, I don't know if I could pinpoint precisely where we are, but disk to disk backup and replication are next on my plate. This is a key part of the storage infrastructure, being able to move things around and protect data in case of a disaster," he says. Stokes says that disaster recovery and data assurance were the first priorities in the new storage infrastructure. Now that he feels confident in those capabilities, Stokes says that he plans to move forward to performance issues with both virtualized storage and virtualized servers.

Why not begin with performance as the first issue tackled? Stokes says, "Disaster recovery really is key. We're an e-commerce environment but we're not an e-commerce retailer. I needed disk but I didn't need maximum IO in terms of performance. We have a lot of data we have to make available and keep secure, so my priority is availability and security rather than raw performance." He explains that the Brookline environment doesn't include a thousand people hitting on a database at one time that makes storage performance the key issue.

When asked about the reasons Brookline focused attention on disaster recovery capabilities rather than simply signing a contract with a well-known business-continuity service provider, Stokes says, "Realistically my thinking is that we're looking in-house for all the disaster recovery requirements. I can get more value out of having disk available to me here rather than having a farm available to me somewhere in case I have a big problem. Like everybody, I'm focused on tactical issues, shortening my backup window and being able to provision servers more quickly. Will H1N1 mean more people working from remote locations or from home? We have to be able to provision servers to allow us to be very flexible very quickly."

The virtual servers created through VMWare and virtual storage components created on the EMC hardware and managed with the Navisphere software allow the IT group to take advantage of rapid virtual provisioning to respond to short term spikes in demand for data and services. Stokes says, "I think we're very much in the same place as a corporate CIO. Corporate networks and public-sector networks are the same. It's all about governance, management and resiliency. It's an evolution."

Ultimately, Stokes says, a successful move to virtualization is based on the same factors that govern success in any IT transition. "The goals of three years ago versus two years ago versus next year shift, and you want to make sure that all the investments you make in your infrastructure are reusable. Our decisions in storage have an impact on our virtualization, and our decisions in virtualization have an impact on disaster recovery."

For the town of Brookline, keeping data safe and available has been entrusted to a virtual environment. Stokes doesn't know precisely what either the environment or the infrastructure will look like years from now, but he seems confident that the process followed in the last three years has laid a foundation that will allow his organization to grow and be flexible to meet any needs the citizens of Brookline might have when it comes to their city's data.

What does it mean to build a truly-balanced PC? How great would it be to piece together a machine bottlenecked by neither CPU or GPU? We set forth to measure the perfect balance in seven different games and four resolutions in this first of several parts.

The first phone to use Version 2.0 of Google's Android mobile operating system hit the shelves over the weekend in the form of the Motorola Droid, being peddled by Verizon Wireless. Android, as usual, wowed customers with a wide variety of new and exciting features — the handset housing it, however, did not.

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In the world of application performance management and network security monitoring, visibility is key. If you can't detect it, you can't do anything about it. That is why networks are populated with probes, taps and in-line sensors. Lancope, in addition to a system wide software upgrade, announced a new probe, the FlowSensory AE, that collects Netflow v9 records and sends them to a collector for collection and analysis. In addition, Lancope has extended Netflow v9 with additional fields that the StealthWatchXE collects outside of the normal flow data such as addresses, ports and byte counts.

The FlowSensor AE is a passive Netflow V9 generator that feeds records to the StealthWatch XE. The AE-1000 can process up to 1.5 Gbps traffic, and the AE-2000 can process upto 2.5 Gbps. Collecting Netflow records is trivial, and there are a number of free or low cost collection and analysis tools available, such as Flow-Tools, nfdump and NfSen. Lancope added custom fields to Netflow v9 records to export data that is not available from pure flow data. FlowSensor AE prices start at $6,995.

Most network communications are bi-directional with a connection from the client to the server and a second connection from the server to the client. One connection is really two or more flows. Flow data typically contains data about the flow, such as addressing, port numbers, byte counts and duration. While flow data can provide interesting analysis, it can't be used for more advanced analysis like application analysis.

FlowSensor AE collects and reports data that is found deeper in the TCP/UDP  header and payload. For example, FlowSensor AE reports Server Response Time (SRT) by tracking the time from the point a TCP three-way handshake completes to the time when the first data packet arrives. The SRT is the gap in between. FlowSensor AE reports minimum, maximum and average response times. The data is sent to the Stealthwatch XE for analysis. Straight Netflow reporting wouldn't provide the SRT since it isn't captured in flow data. In addition, the FlowSensor AE also supports the ability to collect application data. Spam bots can be detected based on the number of recipients that an email is sent to. FlowSensor AE counts the number of recipients and reports that number in a Newflow v9 record. The collector matches that with the flow and reports potential spam hosts. Netflow v9 is a flexible reporting protocol with the ability to collect and count almost anything. Monitoring virtual web servers—servers with multiple web servers sharing the same IP—can be easily tracked and monitored by collecting the HTTP host header field.

Finally, the FlowSensor AE can be configured to capture and forward a portion of the Ethernet payload to a collector for analysis; this is useful for passive OS detection. By default, the FlowSensor can forward the first 120 bytes, enough to capture IPv4, IPv6 headers, the TCP/UDP headers and some of the payload, and then send it to a StealthWatch XE collector. Lancope's Adam Powers said "some of these fields are Lancope specific extensions, but we use standardized one where they already exist."

It was over a year ago that I wrote about the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), a new global standard for the enforcement of intellectual monopolies currently being discussed by representatives of the United States, the European Commission, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand. Since then, the secret negotiations have been continuing, and the threats it poses to the Internet as we know it grow ever larger.

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Batman: Arkham Asylum is purported to be the definitive Batman game. We're testing it on a range of mainstream graphics cards, a number of CPU settings, and with PhysX on and off. You'll walk away from this one knowing whether an upgrade is in order.

For a budget Windows 7 thin-and-light that won't need to recharge often, you could do a lot worse than the Toshiba Satellite T135-S1309.

HP is bidding to offer enterprises converged data center management based on virtualized resource pools, including networks and storage as well as servers, and managing them as an 'elastic' data center that can expand and contract with the economy. HP's customer research during the current recession found that 80% of IT professionals out of 550 interviewed lacked confidence in their data centers' ability to scale up and scale down again, in response to economic fluctuations. At the same time, 90% believed the economy will continue to undergo unpredictable and volatile expansions and contractions.

"We believe IT can help the company gain in any economic conditions, if its technology is appropriately managed," said Deb Nelson, senior VP for marketing, HP Enterprise Business. "Virtual resource pools are just as important for the network and storage as they are for servers," she added in an interview.

HP is bringing some of its well established expertise in network and systems management, business process management, and services management to bear on an old problem -- reorganization of the data center. Part of HP's initiative is to push new professional services, what it calls Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services, that it said can help a data center staff make a transition.

At the same time HP believes it's got new tools with which its customers can attack the problem. HP's Converged Infrastructure architecture provides for managing virtual resource pools of storage through its StorageWorks storage management system. Nelson said HP's StorageWorks Division has been augmented through the July purchase of Ibrix, the maker of Fusion software. It can find underutilized storage, add it to a virtual pool and invoke it for a particular application workload.

Use of a virtual storage pool can reduce the cost per GB of storage from $3 -- $4 to $1.80, Nelson said. In a similar manner, virtual pools of network and server resources, managed centrally to scale up or scale back for certain applications, as demand dictates, can offer similar savings, she said. The StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage System set of products can take now advantage of Ibrix capabilities to build a virtual storage pool of up to 16 petabytes, according to the announcement Wednesday.

The StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform in its 3.0 version also offers a new Command View management interface, which creates virtual storage pools from capacity found in multiple StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays. This management interface can improve capacity utilization by 300%, Nelson claimed. Storage arrays are sometimes used at 30% of capacity or less, due to a tendency by storage managers to overprovision applications.

Paul Miller, VP of marketing for HP (NYSE: HPQ) Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking, said the Converged Infrastructure architecture is "a way to build the data center of the future and deploy a cloud-like infrastructure operating system." The comment is an echo of VMware's announced intent to provide a data center operating system by coordinating management of virtualized resources through the virtual machine management layer.

HP will offer Infrastructure Operating Environment as a component of its infrastructure. IOE is a shared-services engine for automated provisioning of virtual and physical servers, equipped with network and storage connections. It focuses operations control in one command center. The core of IOE is HP's Insight Software, a set of products which can provision, deploy, and monitor BladeSystem Matrix, HP's blade unit that pre-integrates networking and storage into a blade cluster. BladeSystem is HP's unified computing system which launched last May.

Insight Dynamics has been given new features for automated provisioning of servers, automated recovery of failed servers, and automated recovery of virtual machines on HP ProLiant servers. HP works with the major virtualization vendors, including VMware's vCenter virtual machine management software and Microsoft's System Center's ability to manage Hyper-V virtual machines.

Miller, in an interview, said the infrastructure architecture includes HP FlexFabric, which consolidates multiple protocols into a single network fabric, allowing both Ethernet network data and storage data to occupy the same network. FlexFabric is a merging of technologies from the HP ProCurve family of switching devices; HP Virtual Connect, which virtualizes server I/O; and technology partner contributions.

The fabric's ability to deal with more than one protocol simplifies storage network and Ethernet network operations. "There are fewer network ports, fewer cables, fewer switches" to administer, Miller said, making it easier to scale up or scale back network capabilities.

This part of the HP announcement is an echo of Cisco Systems' Unified Computing System announcements made in March, where networking and storage I/O are virtualized across one Cisco network fabric. For more comment on HP's moves in relation to Cisco, see Alex Wolfe's Global CIO commentary, "HP Revs Data Center Strategy, Stabbing At Cisco."

Miller said the HP FlexFabric brings more value to the data center than just converged networking. By reducing the amount of cables and equipment needed to implement a network fabric, IT managers can reduce their overall cost structure, reassign network resources as needed, and more quickly provision new servers.

The Converged Infrastructure architecture is also designed to improve data center power management, moving virtual machines off of underutilized servers, and shutting down other unneeded equipment.

On November 12th, get current on Network Computing Virtual Event: Next-Generation Networks. Registration required.

The last month has seen a flurry of announcements as companies have raced to introduce products designed to make network links seem larger and applications faster without requiring new connections or servers. The products approach the issue from different directions, but looked at together, they illustrate an industry searching for ways to make the most of existing infrastructure while waiting and hoping for economic expansion to pick up once again.

If there's a "common thread" to the movement represented by the new product announcements, it's that IT departments are no longer content to look solely at "one size fits all" solutions to bandwidth optimization. While it's still possible to find products such as Riverbed's Steelhead appliance, which has a broad functional footprint, much of the industry's effort is now spent on more narrowly-focused solutions. Exinda, for example, recently released the 8760, aimed at backbone networks with multi-gigabyte native performance. Riverbed Steelhead Mobile 3.0 targets the growing number of users accessing mission-critical applications via wireless network links, and Folder Maestro focuses on non-streaming, traditional files.

Does this new direction mean that companies will be forced to deploy multiple network optimization products to create a single integrated solution? Not necessarily, though networks that incorporate more than one network optimization technology will almost certainly become far more common in the years ahead. Instead, I believe companies will be looking much more closely at applications and aspects of network performance that are considered critical, and focus their optimization efforts there. For some, the key will be link reduction, as they attempt to reduce costs by consolidating multiple T1 or T3 lines into single WAN connections. For others, the critical consideration will be the performance of a single enterprise application (or suite of applications), regardless of how the application is accessed or where the user is physically working.

Increased thought and planning before implementation is, in itself, a key part of the new methodology put in place to optimize network bandwidth, and it is of a piece with the movements in the rest of the IT world. Merely throwing faster hardware at a problem is no longer seen as a reasonable response when new needs are identified. The old computing model that saw hardware as cheap and analysis as expensive has been replaced by a more balanced approach that uses careful analysis to guide the purchase of systems that meet current and critical needs.

Economic necessity is, without question, the mother of this new attention to specific needs and requirements, and network optimization vendors are racing to present solutions to ever-more-sharply defined problems. The result will be a "best of breed" scenario that isn't at all new in the IT industry, with the almost inevitable long-term swing back to a fashionable all-in-one integrated solution. In the meantime, though, IT administrators are getting useful practice at defining needs and measuring outcomes, and network infrastructure vendors are getting better at presenting serious solutions to highly-targeted problems.

With similar results as its ancestors, the Dell Inspiron 545s-1476N registers decent benchmarks and offers respectable upgradability, but we hesitate to recommend it over the older Gateway SX2800-01 that leaves Dell in the dust in regards to both performance and features.

When it comes to mechanical hard drive performance, 7,200 RPM drives are considered the fastest. But does that convention apply in a NAS environment as well? We compare network storage performance with a handful of Samsung's "green" drives to see.

The Gateway NV5207u is certainly above average for the money, but its processor is a dog.

As I've mentioned before I'm an openSUSE user, and as long as they don't make the "U" lower case again, I'll probably stick with it. When it comes to package management, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprice (and SuSE before them) are usually associated with YaST (and yes, I'm still waiting for them to upper case the "a"). YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE: yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.

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The NetGear WNHDEB111 HD Gaming Wireless N Networking Kit is a good investment if you want to add a high-speed Wireless-N connection your HD video streamer or game console.

There's actually a lot to discuss in this month's column: the introduction of AMD's new Radeon HD 5000-series GPUs, Nvidia's new GeForce GT 220 and GeForce 210, availability of previous-gen high-end cards, and the state of the graphics war in general.

BitTorrent is one of the most contentious technologies available. At least, that is, to the Old Order, those lovely suit-clad corporate types bent on holding technology forever in the days of the — manual — typewriter. The technology, and the suits' dreams of a world free of it, are on trial in Australia, where Linux made an appearance today — at the defense table.

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AVADirect's tries to distill as much gaming power as possible into its Nano Cube, but the extra small case requires too many sacrifices next to even standard small form factor PCs. Gaming purists with a need for an extra tiny PC might appreciate the Nanon Cube, but even they should be wary of everything you need to give up for this tiny desktop.

Good design and some really nice-sounding speakers round out the Toshiba Satellite A505-S6980, a very affordable mainstream laptop with excellent battery life for its size.

The walls between voice services, social networking and collaboration are starting to fall as vendors blend unified communications with wikis, blogs and Twitter. At VoiceCon 2009, Siemens Communications is launching a demo of a forthcoming integration between OpenScape, its UC platform, and Twitter, the insanely popular micro-blogging network. The integration will enable OpenScape users to initiate phone conferences from a Twitter post, as well as have the conference service dial Twitter users. "If you include two people in a tweet and say 'Let's get on a conference call,' it creates a conference call without you having to go and set it up yourself," says Paul Maddison, operations manager for partnerships at Siemens Communications.

Maddison says the other parties on the tweet don't have to be on the OpenScape platform. Instead, OpenScape can check their Twitter profiles for a phone number, or check the contact list of the conference organizer to see if a Twitter identity is associated with a user in the contact profile. It will also allow OpenScape users to change their status and messaging preferences via a tweet. For instance, an employee could tweet about her arrival at an overseas airport, and OpenScape will adjust her presence profile for the appropriate location and time zone.

Siemens expects a production version of the integration to be available in the first quarter of 2010. In the meantime, a demo will be posted on the OpenScape Youtube channel. In addition Siemens is making an SDK available for developers to experiment with the integration. Siemens is hosting OpenScape software on an Amazon EC2 platform, where developers can use the SDK and run a development instance of OpenScape for a hourly fee. Meanwhile, earlier this week PBworks announced upgrades to its collaboration service to enable real-time collaboration, including IM, presence and live editing of content. The company also announced plans to add voice conferencing to its service portfolio.

PBworks will offer its own IM client built on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) standard. The client will be available as a standard feature of its eponymous SaaS-based collaboration service. With live editing, multiple users can view a wiki page and see changes being made in real time. Note that PBworks follows the single-editor model, in which only one person at a time can make changes. Both the IM and live edit features will be available November 17th.

As for voice, this will be an additional paid service and is expected to launch in 2010. Using the voice service, PBworks will be able to initiate a conference call by clicking on the profiles of other PBworks users, or by entering their phone number into the user interface. The voice service will be based on the SIP protocol and built around Freeswitch, an open-source soft switch telephony platform.

Collaboration And UC Combine
UC integrates text-based messaging, such as e-mail and IM with VoIP. IM also brings presence into the UC mix--the ability to let followers know where you are, your availability, and what you're up to. By integrating voice with messaging, UC platforms wrap major business communications tools into a single toolbox, and let end users pick the most appropriate tool for the most appropriate job.

Collaboration and social networking tend to be text-oriented systems that focus on making it easier for users to create and share documents and files, create user profiles, build project teams and workspaces, find experts and build social groups that exist outside traditional organizational divisions, such as business units or departments. Twitter-like microblogs and activity streams also serve a presence-like function because users can update their status for anyone that follows them.

Until now, UC and collaboration/social networking have lived in separate spaces on the Venn diagram of business tools. The announcements from Siemens and PBworks demonstrate the affinity that exists between these platforms. Users are quick to adopt useful tools that help them share information and work with co-workers, business partners and customers. The distinction between a UC platform and a collaboration platform will cease to be relevant, at least from the perspective of a user.

That said, neither the OpenScape/Twitter integration nor the PBworks voice service will be available until next year. Integrating these platforms will take significant effort, in part because they introduce new complications for vendors. Case is point is PBworks; the company says the real holdup for its voice offering isn't because it has to figure out how to connect telephones, but because it needs to create a billing system.

Still, the trend toward integration is clear, and we can expect more vendors to come forward with plans to link UC, collaboration and social networking. It's just a question of when.