Public Sector Institute

One clear objective of the FDCCI is to help agencies leverage best practices from the public and private sector to shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies—i.e. the Cloud.

And since the idea is to buy less, not more brick and mortar infrastructure (whose true costs go way beyond just the price of IT), government is going to turn to the private sector to provide easy-to-use, secure Cloud-based platforms.

To learn more what future Cloud formations will look like in the next 5 years, On The FrontLines interviewed thought leaders from five government Cloud providers.

The Value-First Mindset

Mark Weber, NetApp, President Public Sector sees a fair number of agencies consolidating in internal Clouds; but for Cloud to really take hold in federal agencies, issues related to culture and budgets must be solved.

That includes giving up “server hugging” and shifting emphasis to acquisitions that are more service-related. “All those things come into play with Cloud adoption; and culture is an issue that is going to have to evolve over time,” said Weber.

Part of evolving culture is educating customers on getting full value from their technology choices.

“Our value proposition and our go-to-market plan with customers is not terabytes per dollar, it’s the value of each terabyte you get,” explained Weber.

“What we are talking about is storage efficiency, not just storage. We are a software company; 90% of our research and development goes into software that increases efficiency. The recipe for efficiency is not just one tool, for example deduplication or thin provisioning, but using all these different technologies to get the best value out of each terabyte you buy.”

The average terabyte sold is utilized only 30% of the time; 70% is empty waiting for something to happen; growing utilization to 70% or more delivers value that translates directly into ROI for Cloud providers and customers. That is the whole Cloud efficiency message according to Weber.

Infrastructure Evolution

John Trauth, President of Merlin also sees policy issues standing in the way of government using public Clouds.

But Trauth said the private Cloud value proposition of enhanced capacity management, elastic compute resources, the consolidation of data centers and moving away from silos gives government the economic value of having a centralized architecture it can afford.

“The evolution of what we have learned about how to effectively run computing infrastructure and compute resources has gone from mainframes to decentralization and back as the pendulum has swung back and forth,” Trauth explained.

“Each has benefits, but it is an evolution, something we can grow over a period of time. It gives all the things we love about the mainframe, with the benefits that decentralization brings.”

Cloud computing will become a natural extension of infrastructure development. The added value to manage compute resources and reallocate resources on demand makes it unlikely to be overridden by any alternative architecture according to Trauth.

“What we will see continue is the trend surrounding tools to manage these Cloud environments. Greater active monitoring of capacity and capacity management; enhanced security to ensure isolation between virtual components and improvements in the speed of physical interconnects and the underlying hardware.”

“Look for the continued simplification of development of completely virtual networked environments,” said Trauth.

The Simple, Easy-To-Use Cloud

At Brocade, Stephen Wallo is Principal Systems Architect. He says their vision is first and foremost to make things easy and simple to use.

“We take a different approach, asking: what does it mean to be in the Cloud; how does that apply to virtualization; how can we make it simple and easy to manage?” Most importantly Wallo said everything must work with what the agency already has, leveraging resources to keep the network running at all times.

Over the next 5 years Wallo thinks Cloud standards and security will be in place. “Then you will see technologies arise that leverage what’s already available and providers will be able to leverage each other’s core strengths to build new capabilities.”

Wallo advises program managers when they talk to their IT departments about the Cloud, they ask these pros to seek out as many companies as they can.

“Ask what their vision is; ask how do I grow into something that enables me to do virtualization and Cloud?” counsels Wallo. “You can’t get there immediately; you have to ask ‘how do I get to where I want to go?’” And of course, make it simple and easy to use.

Centralized Distributed Computing

While looking to the future, first don’t overlook your infrastructure—and the ROI it can provide quickly—in place today said Bill Hartwell, General Manager & Senior Director, Federal Markets Division, Riverbed Technology.

“Give them ability to see the ROI. Once you start to realize what you want to optimize and accelerate, then you have huge opportunities to consolidate and modernize,” said Hartwell.

“The speed agencies decide to make those decisions will totally impact their ROI. I encourage them to do it now; don’t wait, because the longer you wait it reduces your ROI,” Hartwell asserted. “There are plenty of agencies already doing this, so don’t feel like this is so early that it is high risk, because frankly it isn’t.”

Hartwell looks to the future and sees acceleration technologies that solve limited bandwidth and latency issues, which translate into application performance issues. If apps run too slow, productivity gains are lost.

“The real problem of an agency like NIH or VA is they have thousands of employees and contractors they must communicate with daily at hundreds of sites nationwide and worldwide,” explained Hartwell.

“Anybody that is remote—outside of the LAN—is going to be dependent on how that app performs over that wide area network and latency is the big killer to an app’s performance because of distance. It is very important that if you have technologies that can eliminate latency from that pipe; Just doing that reaps huge performance gains and defrays bandwidth upgrade costs for years.”

Hartwell believes the federal government is going to migrate to several, if not many private Clouds.

“My vision is very large and virtual Data Centers that you may not know where they are; but it doesn’t matter where the Data Center or you are located, because you have real time performance for data and apps, whether you are a fixed or mobile user; you’ll get high performance in real time around the globe. I think they will be using optimization and acceleration technologies to build those private Clouds and will virtualize and consolidate in the process.”

So, computing will be more centralized but will have the appearance of being distributed in the way that people can collaborate on global basis.

Order Full Business Applications From A Catalog of Services

Brian Burba, Vice President, Business Development, Cloud Customer Solutions Unit at CA Technologies thinks the big trend over the next five years is that “compute becomes incidental, almost like the network has become incidental.”

The network has become so standardized, there is no real rocket science there anymore said Burba. “With compute it will be the same thing. What will change is above that compute space; the work of assembling technology solutions that actually stands up the application and makes the application as a business service go.”

Burba described extraordinary productivity improvements that will change the way IT capabilities and services are built and acquired.

“You are going to get agility with new efficiencies in that arena. That is the fulcrum of agility; where the rubber meets the road in terms of standing something up.”

“Imagine a world where you don’t order servers and build things up from your IT group; simply there is a catalog of solutions, you just pull from the catalog and the entry includes everything you need to roll out that business service.”

So, all the components are preconfigured, prewired, pretested and ready to go. You get whole application stack and that allows you to do new things much faster, plus you maintain existing things at far less expense.

We see a group emerging called Applications Operations Burba said.

“This is kind of place where the app developers and those who stand it up come together; because the stack that developers need can be available to them in an instant not just for testing, but for production. We see the timeline collapsing from months and weeks to days, hours and minutes to stand things up.”

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