Turning Destroyers Into Priuses

Far-fetched? Sounds impossible? But that’s exactly what the Navy is doing according to RADM Philip Cullom, Director, Fleet Readiness Division and Task Force Energy, USN.

“The Navy is planning to sail the ‘Great Green Fleet’,” RADM Cullom said, “in effect we are turning destroyers into Priuses.” The Navy will demonstrate a Green Strike Group in local operations by 2012 and sail it by 2016.   Read More

National Park Service Rewards "French Fried Heat"

The next time you eat french fries at Yellowstone National Park, you don't have to feel guilty about the calories. Feel good that you will also be helping heat many of Yellowstone's buildings. 

Xanterra Parks and Recreation -- a 2009 National Park Service Environmental Achievement Award winner -- cuts emissions of greenhouse gases and conserves energy by supplying used cooking oil from the company’s eateries to run boilers at its hotels. Read More

November 2009 •Volume 7 • Number 6

The Greening of Government

Click on The Greening of Government Cover (at right) to experience Turn-Page technology. Read how DHS, GSA and Yellowstone National Park are "on the frontlines" of The Greening of Government.

From the expanses of Yellowstone National Park to the urban neighborhoods of Washington DC, the Greening of Government movement is alive, well and growing daily.

At one of the country’s national treasures, National Park officials have set out lofty goals as part of their Yellowstone Environmental Stewardship (YES!) Initiative.

At the same time, at the historic site of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington DC, DHS and GSA are working together to create the new Green DHS Headquarters.

Both of these programs reflect the government’s commitment to Greening because it’s the right way—in fact the only way—to do business that ensures sustainability.

So, get ready. If you haven’t already been, then you are now being recruited to be “On The Frontlines” of the Greening of Government movement.

This Greening of Government is the second in a series of “On The Frontlines” digital reports using Turn-Page technology.

Each “On The Frontlines” digital report is produced using “Turn Page Technology” allowing you to read and turn the pages electronically on your computer just as you would with a print publication.

Additionally, embedded links give you direct access to websites and white papers; you can watch video clips of leaders on the Green frontlines such as Ed O’Hare at GSA, and Donald Bathurst at DHS. Or view a slideshow detailing the sustainability efforts at Yellowstone National Park.

And of course, you can download and/or print a PDF version. We hope you find the report useful and share it with your colleagues.

EXPERIENCE Turn-Page technology! Click on The Greening of Government cover (at right).

Here is a sample of the articles. Click on The Greening of Government cover to read them all.

A Sustainable Strategy

Executive Order 13514 sets the goals. Leaders from EPA, DOE, GSA and DHS talk about what they are doing.

Buying Green Saves Green

The emphasis on buying Green products for government use and plus buying from suppliers who are Green themselves is only going to grow.

Greening Where It Is Urban: DHS HQ in DC

At St. Elizabeths in Washington DC, the site of the new DHS headquarters campus, DHS is proving homeland security can be Green, historic – and secure.

Follow My Example

Many in Industry are Greening themselves because it is not only good for the environment, it’s good for business.

August 28, 2009 • Volume 7 • Number 5

Providing Infrastructure For "The Sweet Stuff"

The vision is articulated among government IT professionals whenever the conversation turns to modernizing infrastructure, implementing virtualization and/or embracing cloud computing.

“As the Infrastructure Officer, from an efficiency standpoint, part of my job is to reduce what I look at as being the burden of infrastructure in order to allow people to focus on the information and the applications.”

To me, that’s the sweet stuff,” Timothy Quinn, Chief Infrastructure Officer at the Department of Interior said during the recent Federal Executive Forum on Infrastructure broadcast on Federal News Radio.

 “My vision for the Department of Interior is an array of infrastructure services that will be provided to a very highly mobile workforce,” declared Quinn.

That workforce will use highly collaborative converged IP voice and video services that cross many boundaries -- state, local, tribal, other federal, and international said Quinn.

They are the stewards of more than 20% of the land in the US -- 500 million acres. With a large field staff out in parks, refuges, Indian reservations and other public lands, Quinn said these pros must have an IT infrastructure primed to handle the rigors of 21^st century information sharing. 

Joining Quinn on the Forum panel, hosted by Jim Flyzik of The Flyzik Group were:

·         Karl Krumbholz, Director, Network Services Programs, ITS/GSA

·         Margie Graves, Acting CIO, Department of Homeland Security

·         David Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Citrix Systems

·         Gary DePreta, Manager, Channel Operations, Federal Channels, Cisco Systems

·         Michael Donovan, Chief Technologist, EDS

Quinn told the audience that the primary network optimization effort at Interior is through their Enterprise Services Network, which is a managed service acquired through GSA and the Networx program.  Infrastructure Sweet Stuff Continued Below  Watch Quinn Video

Underpinning Homeland Infrastructure

Getting out of the infrastructure business is one of acting DHS CIO Margie Graves biggest wishes. “I want to get to the point where the CIOs are concentrating on their mission applications, and concentrating on the delivery of the data to people who need it at the correct time.”

“So our play in this is all about the data -- securing at the data layer, having data standards and moving information as quickly as we possibly can."  Read More   Watch Graves Video

Networx is playing a key role in modernizing government infrastructure – and will have even a larger role when agencies are finally transitioned from FTS 2001 to Networx.

Karl Krumbholz is GSA’s director of Network Services. His team manages the Networx contract, but even as Krumbholz focuses on transition -- which is calls his “top priority”-- he has his eyes on the future. “We are focused on adding new services to our contracts to address the evolving needs of our agency customers and to meet government mandates.”  Read More   Watch Krumbholz Video

Virtualization technologies are optimizing infrastructure, separating the application from the underlying infrastructure. No longer does a one-to-one server relationship necessary. In fact, the technology is enabling according to Gary DePreta from Cisco.

But while technology is important, it is not the only dynamic at work. “At Cisco, we study the future of work and the future of connected life."  Read More  Watch DePreta Video

Providing the technologies that help enable the transition of government has been what Citrix has concentrated on during its 20 year history.

“What we are looking to do is help organizations optimize their current networks better and leverage their existing infrastructure and transform that infrastructure into an architecture where service delivery is the bottom line,” said Citrix’s David Smith.   Read More  
Watch Smith Video

A lot of what is going on today in modernizing infrastructure has to do with moving to a shared infrastructure or paying for services “by the drink” (e.g. cloud computing).

“When you think about the movement towards cloud, when you think about the movement towards virtualization, when you think about consolidation, what you are really talking about is moving towards a shared environment,” said EDS’s Mike Donovan. And that raises questions.  Read More Watch Donovan Video

Vital To Success

“Networx has been vital to our success in providing network services to 2,400 locations. Built on top of this IP-based network are a number of initiatives that we are looking at as being focused on green IT, providing enterprise data centers and virtualized centers.”

Quinn sees these efforts as supporting federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s vision of cloud computing and optimizing efficiencies and economics, while improving services to Interior’s far flung customers.

Quinn faces a number of infrastructure challenges starting with the fact that Interior has so many different lines of businesses – with different priorities. Plus, because of its mission and relationship with the American people and the land, Interior wants to be seen as being a green leader when it comes to IT.

“We go from science to land management to minerals and many others. And to take one in particular, I like to call it science versus security,” explained Quinn.  

“We have scientists, maybe a volcanologist or a geologist or working on climate change and those scientists have a high need for collaboration on a massive scale with departments. In fact many of our scientists are located at colleges and universities, which gives us significant challenges in trying to give them all the network and full array of IT services that they need in order to do their job, while at the same time trying to secure that in such a way that we don’t completely cut them off from communicating with their scientist collaborators. So a lot of work to do there and we look at Web 2.0 technologies as providing a lot of help.

Quinn is looking to the CIO Council to continue its work on solving the issues surrounding architecture and infrastructure that many agencies face.  “We are not the only ones with these problems. We talk to the Department of Energy, NASA, NOAA; lots of folks have similar problems.”

Like many agencies, a big concern is IT governance. At Interior they rely on a well defined set of rules said Quinn.

Interior has an IT Management Committee that includes the CIOs of all of the bureaus. “They meet on a regular basis to discuss issues. Underneath that we have our CTO’s committee which handles a lot of the standards work and development within Interior. Underneath that we have operational change management for network systems and desk top. Sort of parallel to that we have investment review board and working capital fund consortium.

Quinn acknowledged that it sounds like a lot of committees, but made it clear there is well defined set of rules in terms of who does what and there’s a lot of interaction between those groups.

###

Marching Toward The Cloud

“I’m actually looking forward to the day when Cloud is my legacy environment; where it becomes part and parcel of how I’m doing business on a day to day basis; where things like Web 2.0 applications are part and parcel of our business,” said DISA’s Henry Sienkiewicz.

Sienkiewicz, the Technical Program Director, Computer Services at DISA, talked about how DISA envisions using Cloud Computing during a recent Federal Executive Forum on Cloud Computing broadcast on Federal News Radio.

Joining Sienkiewicz on the panel hosted by Jim Flyzik of The Flyzik Group were:

·         Ronald Bechtold, Army Architecture Integration Center, at Headquarters, Department of the Army, Chief Information Office/G6

·         Curt Aubley, Technology Officer CTO Operations & Next Generation Solutions, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Services

·         Dale Wickizer, Chief Technology Officer-Public Sector, NetApp, Inc.

·         Aileen Black, Vice President of Public Sector, VMware Inc.

Sienkiewicz talked about a future where wikis, blogs, mashups are used as critical tools in the daily operational environment for communication inside the department.

He said for the user it’s pretty much self service. For the environment, Cloud Computing provides elasticity. “Security becomes streamlined; it’s very easy and straight forward to bring a new application in -- at least with these widgets and mashups,” explained Sienkiewicz.

What is delivered is transparency on the way that DISA is delivering services. Customers can see what they are doing with real metrics. Now there are real benchmarks for accountability because there’s standardization and homogeneity underneath the environment. Read More Below

"The Army is an organization with a long tradition of decentralized execution," Ronald Bechtold, the director of the Army Architecture Integration Center, Chief Information Office/G6, told the Federal Executive Forum audience. Bechtold's mission is making the US motto “E Pluribus Unum” a reality for the Army. And he is counting on Cloud Computing to help him accomplish his mission. Read More

Cloud Covered

“We have Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, public Clouds, private Clouds, hybrid accommodations,” Lockheed Martin’s Curt Aubley told the Forum audience. Aubley and his colleagues have been researching and developing Cloud solutions for more than three years, looking to solve problems that were hard to tackle with current technologies -- often in very creative ways. Read More

Cloud Stewards

Dale Wickizer’s job is to help educate NetApp customers and help them figure out how to be better stewards of their data infrastructure. “With Infrastructure-as-a-Service now practical to do, I can’t think of a greater time or a greater need for being able to protect your data as all the changes going on,” said Wickizer, who is CTO, Public Sector for NetApp, Inc. “If you have good fallback strategies, you have consistent ways of doing backup so you are protected as well as being more efficient.” Read More

Cloud Underpinnings

Aileen Black, the Vice President of Public Sector, VMware Inc., is not shy about saying these are exciting times for the federal IT community. “Virtualization and Cloud Computing are really going to allow customers to do more with less. We believe virtualization is the underpinning of Cloud Computing,” said Black during the Forum. “This underpinning allows you to create a fabric across all your resources both internally and externally to provide a presentation of all the resources to the end." Read More

Cloud Constituency

Sienkiewicz said the DISA computing services team is pushing the Cloud inside the Defense Department.

“When we are looking at the Cloud, DISA as the institutional provider of computing services for the Defense Department, we are really looking across an entire spectrum of services and changing the paradigm on how we are delivering services out to our constituency, whether it’s a Warfighter in the field, or a Warfighter back in the sustaining base, or one of our vendor partners.”

“We are looking across the entire gamut of Cloud. We are looking at Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Applications-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service and Data-as-a-Service.”

That’s quite a challenge for an institutional provider of IT services that has gone through a series of transformations over the last couple of decades, including everything from data center consolidations from 190 plus to today’s 13, to embracing virtualization technologies, to increasing managed services.

“We just see Cloud really as the next iteration on where we are moving on delivering services,” noted Sienkiewicz. “The key component of it all is we are looking at this very much as a service delivery model.”

He explained that DISA managed services contracts use O&M dollars, not procurement dollars. “We are looking at how we allow people to pay by the use.” explained Sienkiewicz. “We are changing that part of the procurement model; we are working very heavily with the development community on defining those standards and best practices so that we can easily move the applications servers into the environment.”

The end result is being able to support the Warfighter better. So across the board we are seeing the Cloud as an enabler and it’s a challenge to us; it’s a good goal Sienkiewicz said. •