InfoStrat's Townsend Report

Larry Larsen interviews Josh Wall of InfoStrat on Microsoft Surface applications for military applications such as mission planning. There's lots of content here, including the Magnifier application, map pushpins, integration of imagery and more.

The current U.S. economic crisis and resulting huge government bailout programs provide an unprecedented opportunity to test information technology solutions for government transparency.

Government officials at federal, state and local levels will suddenly find their programs funded beyond their normal run rates, and will face pressure to spend money quickly to achieve policy goals.

Information technology can help the bailouts succeed in several ways:

1. Federal, state, and local governments need to bridge their information systems so the flow of funding and its ultimate disposition can be tracked.
2. Business intelligence capability is essential to track the metrics of success and show how the results justify the outlays.
3. Portals are needed for government to communicate with constituents, not just for sharing information but for two-way collaboration. Already Virginia is asking businesses and individuals to propose plans online.
4. Integration with mapping software can provide pow…

Government information technology managers are warming to server virtualization as a means to save money, reduce energy consumption, and simplify management of servers. New products and technologies are bringing virtualization to large and small data centers.

Prior to virtualization, servers were dedicated to particular tasks. Every new application would require the acquisition of one or more new servers. In a large data center, this would ultimately lead to proliferation of servers, and the models and configurations of the hardware would change over time. There was no easy way to scale up applications which needed more hardware horsepower, short of migrating to a new server, and, more commonly, no easy way to take advantage of unused horsepower for servers that largely sit idle.

Every new server demands more resources to keep it alive, including power, connectivity, backup, and management. As the number of servers grow, so does the need for more racks, more floor space and more ai…