StreamJockey

Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative

A summary of the memo from the Federal CIO

The reported number of Federal data centers in 2009 is more than 1,100.In 2006, Federal servers and data centers consumed over 6 billion kWh of electricity and without a fundamental shift in how we deploy technology it could exceed 12 billion kWh by 2011.

The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative aims to address these challenges by leveraging best practices in the public and private sector. The focus of this initiative is to:

• Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers
  
• Reduce the cost of data center hardware, software and operations
  
• Increase the overall IT security posture of the government
  
• Shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies

The full two page PDF can be seen here: Download 27535844-Data-Center-Consolidation-Memo-02-26-10

Applications, Services, and Hardware We Use

These are applications, services, and devices we use every day and/or for specific projects. For example, while we currently are not using CacheFly, we have made use of the service for particular projects. We expect this post to be updated routinely.

Offsite and Cloud Providers

Amazon Web Services

Apple MobileMe

Google Apps

Backpack and Basecamp from 37signals. And by the way they use Amazon Web Services for storage.

Joyent Accelerator™ Accelerator™ part of the Joyent Public Cloud

CacheNetworks CacheFly

Domain names, hosting, virtual and dedicated servers we use our WebServicesRock.US! affiliate.

Operating Systems

Apple OS X Snow Leopard

Microsoft Windows XP Professional

Windows Vista Ultimate With Windows Vista be productive, entertained, and mobile

And newly released WIndows 7. We'll update our Windows 7 experiences in a future post.

Windows 2003 Server, Standard Edition

Windows 2008 Server, Web and Standard Editions

Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop and Server often as a virtual machine on the Mac.

OpenSolaris which uses arguably the most advanced file system, ZFS. What is ZFS?

Application Software

OS X

Apple iLife '09 has web, music, and photo tools that work great together. We have never had to load a driver to communicate with any cameras we own - they just work.

Apple iWork '09 and iWork.com word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. We also use the iPhone app that both controls the slide show and displays presenter notes.

We use Screenflow for desktop recording on our Mac and also to record Windows when running on under a VM on the Mac. The new version added some nice features including easy publishing to YouTube.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is one of the best Mac applications. 

VMware Fusion 2

Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac

Intuit QuickBooks for Mac we use the 2009 release. The 2010 is out mid-October, 2009. QuickBooks for Mac allows encrypted backups to your MobileMe iDisk. 

TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. We use it on the Mac.

OmniFocus is GTD® style task management for Mac OS X and iPhone. The software has good syncing functionality.

OmniGraffle Professional a drawing program - similar to Visio but for the Mac.

OmniPlan a project planning tool we occasionally use.

iStat pro is a free widget that lets you monitor your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes.

Development

Apple xCode development environment for Mac OS X.

Aptana Studio

Panic Software Transmit ftp client that works with ftp, MobileMe iDisk, Amazon S3, WebDav and more.

Panic Software Coda one-window web development

iPhone Applications

Analytics from AnalyticsApp.com

iStat Shows iPhone stats, monitors remote Mac, Linux & Solaris, CPU, memory, disks, temps, fans, and more. And it has some basic network tools.

OmniFocus Winner of the 2008 Apple Design Award for Best iPhone Productivity Application. We really like this program. It has multiple ways to sync but we use our MobileMe account here too.

Remotely lock your iPhone with Find My iPhone which requires a MobileMe account.

Windows

IIS Internet Information Server - web services. Much of our development targets IIS with ASP.NET.

FileZilla Client free open-source ftp client that runs on many operating systems. We only run it on Windows. There is a server now too that only runs on WIndows. 

Development

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 The Microsoft Store is offering 12 free hours of training with your purchase now. There are numerous free and low-cost add-ins to Visual Studio. We'll show some that we use.

Fog Creek Software's FogBugz hosted on a VM at WebServicesRock.US!

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is a great valued, full-featured UML diagramming program. We use it instead of the much more expensive Rational tools.

OpenSolaris

Apache

Subversion (svn) is an open source version control system.

Processes

We expect to write about some processes that we routinely use in the future.

Devices We Use

Apple MacBook Air 2nd Generation

Apple 20" iMac 

Apple Magic Mouse 

Blue Pen, Mechanical Pencil, pape, and iPhone Application Sketch Pad

The mStand Laptop Stand By Rain Design is a nicely designed stand for desktop we use regularly when working in bed or on the couch. It keeps the laptop at a good angle and most importantly keeps the ventilation at the back hinge clear from blankets etc.

Make a Virtual Machine (VM) from a Physical Machine

One of the great tools from VM software companies allows you to make a VM from a physical machine. This has saved me many times. One memorable occasion came when I had a system with a failing hard disk. Not only was the hard disk failing - there was no way I could get the software installed and configured again! This was because many of the installation media were no longer around or available and the configuration settings were not all documented.

To the rescue came VMWare Converter and Parallels Transporter Both of these products are stand-alone applications that create a VM for their respective VM software. I created a VM successfully using each product.

Now once you have created a VM and you first start that VM several steps may occur. New hardware will most likely be detected, since the VM will not always have the exact virtual hardware that existed on the physical system. But there is almost always an equivalent - for example the graphics or network card may be different but a suitable virtual driver will be presented. This step usually requires a reboot.

Next, depending upon the OS, you may have your OS present an activation window. In my case I was creating a VM from a physical Windows 2003 Standard Server. I then entered my activation code that was originally used to activate that software. (And the physical server would be wiped-clean and scavenged for parts once the VM was up OK.)

Click the link to purchase a downloadable copy of Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac or Parallels Desktop for Mac Premium Edition

If you were to copy the VM to another computer and attempt to start it up there, you would be presented with a dialog to select whether you moved or copied the VM. If you select move the VM will keep all of its settings - such as computer name, MAC, and it would usually not require an OS reactivation and other software should be OK too. If you select copy your VM would end up with a new MAC, you should change the computer name, and you may have to reactivate the OS and possibly other software.