The federal government is in
the early stages of adopting private and public clouds as a way to make
government IT more flexible, elastic and scalable – optimizing efficiency and
reducing costs. With the support of the Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek
Kundra, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a
draft definition of cloud computing to be used across all agencies.
Additionally, the General Services Administration (GSA) issued a Request for
Quotation for cloud and virtual machine services as a preliminary step towards
an online storefront to be used by federal agencies for ordering cloud computing
services.
Before GSA or other agencies
begin to provide and manage resource pools and applications in a cloud
environment – delivering the user an on-demand, pay-per-use service – they must
understand and evaluate their virtual environment and strategy. Virtualization
is a critical element of most cloud implementations and is used to provide the
essential characteristics of location independent of resource pooling.
Virtualization, when used in a cloud environment, enables data centers to
increase their server utilization and become far more flexible. In order to
support a data center virtualization solution and create the path to cloud
computing, federal architects must meet several connectivity requirements as
resources move throughout an agency’s IT infrastructure.
Federal Computer Week,
in partnership with Brocade, will host an executive breakfast titled,
“Next-Generation Data Center – Building a Framework that Enables Virtualization
and Cloud Computing Initiatives” on January 21, 2010 at the Willard
Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. This executive-level educational
breakfast for IT professionals will bring together senior government officials,
federal architects and industry executives to discuss current and emerging
technologies, connectivity challenges and best practices for implementing an
intelligent, integrated data center in a high-performance virtual environment.
Attendees of the breakfast
will learn:
-
How key government
agencies are successfully addressing and embracing virtualized and cloud
initiatives
-
Considerations for
virtualization and cloud ready datacenter design
-
Technology decisions that
must be made today to build a framework for tomorrow’s architecture
-
Keys to enable virtually
unlimited IT infrastructure scalability
-
Increased mission
flexibility through a globally distributed and accessible IT infrastructure
-
Why connectivity is the
key to supporting virtualization and cloud computing
-
How to build an
architecture to support your agency’s data center and provide the “enabling”
layer for server and storage virtualization with built-in intelligence
-
Effective ways to get the
most value from your data center’s technology investments
-
The path from
virtualization to cloud computing to the next-generation data center