Managers' choice: bandwidth now, management later
Network managers who are torn between buying more bandwidth and getting network management tools usually decide in favor of bandwidth, said speakers on a panel at the recent Gignet Conference in Boston. "Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper," said David Dimond of First Consulting Group of Long Beach, Calif. Throwing bandwidth at the WAN is expensive, however, and new telephony applications such as voice-over IP make it hard to keep up with the demand, he said.
Virginia and Dyncorp team up to build a spaceport at NASA site
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Virginia has entered a joint venture with Dyncorp of Reston, Va., to develop and operate the $12 million Virginia Commercial Space Flight Center. Dyncorp will provide $4.5 million in operational support to the spaceport. The spaceport will include a new computer infrastructure for satellite launches. Dyncorp and Virginia will have to come up with $4.5 million more for the vertical service tower and the fueling and encapsulation facility, said Billie Reed, executive director of the
EPA will move old database to new platform
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to move a database containing information about injection wells from its National Computer Center in North Carolina to a new database management system in Atlanta. In a request for quotes last month, EPA called for a vendor to furnish the personnel, services and equipment to migrate the files to an unnamed server and develop a DBMS that can handle geographic information system applications. The vendor would also help integrate the database
EPA has a four-pronged strategy to manage systems enterprisewide
The Environmental Protection Agency is looking for a vendor to help it answer the question: "What does the agency need?" The winning vendor of the $35 million, five-year Information Infrastructure and Architectural Support Contract (IIASC) will analyze EPA's overall systems architecture and create a strategy for designing and buying new systems.
IG berates Space Command
"SPACECOM may be unable to fully execute its mission." The Defense Department's growing reliance on space-based information systems could be compromised if the U.S. Space Command doesn't get a handle on its year 2000 problem, the DOD inspector general said. SPACECOM, at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., and its component commands haven't taken steps to minimize the impact bad date code could have on their mission-critical systems, the IG said in an audit last
Bidders gradually gaining a voice in bid evaluations
With past performance a major evaluation factor in nearly every procurement, doing it right is a universal concern. Guidance comes from rewrites of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, numerous agency rules and directives, and a growing list of bid protest decisions. Because the new regulations don't answer every question, the missing pieces are usually supplied, one at a time, by case decisions—especially General Accounting Office bid protest rulings.
For those who just do not get the message, hold off on junk e-mail
Let me preface this column by noting that no GCN reader committed any of the breaches of e-mail etiquette I am about to describe. Please keep writing for advice and help, or to send me feedback about my last column. I enjoy reading your e-mail whether you agree or disagree with me. But I don't enjoy some of the e-mail that arrives from other sources. You probably don't like everything in your in box, either.
Beat the Clock
A new world order. Paul Strassmann, director of Defense information early in this decade, has put the world on notice that a threshold event in the history of computing took place Aug. 4. On that day, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a 17-page document interpreting its unprecedented year 2000 cost-reporting requirements for public companies, most of which have disclosed little about such liabilities.
Government CIOs have what it takes
Highway 1 is connected to the very-high-performance Backbone Network Service for the Next Generation Internet. The link has made Highway 1 a frequent site for briefings about the Internet follow-on. The organization also brings the Chief Information Officers Council together with industry executives and acts as a technology resource for policy-makers.
GAO finds that systems glitches lead
The Defense Department is unwittingly selling to the public surplus parts containing sensitive military technology, the General Accounting Office said recently. When DOD buys spare parts for aircraft, ships, vehicles and weapons, the department assigns a code to the parts to indicate whether they contain sensitive military technology. But Defense has a history of assigning the wrong demilitarization codes to the parts and selling them anyway, a GAO report said.
Big storm forces FEMA to beef up Web service
The Federal Emergency Management Agency got some emergency assistance of its own last month when Hurricane Bonnie threatened to swamp the agency's Internet connection. Our Web site was under siege," content manager Marc Wolfson said. As the storm moved up the North Carolina Coast, traffic at http://www.fema.gov grew to 2 million hits on Aug. 26—10 times the daily average and more than the T1 connection could handle.
BRIEFING BOOK
Marching orders. Deputy Defense secretary John Hamre late last month issued a memo holding the services, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Department agencies accountable if they don't finish specific year 2000 management tasks by Nov. 1. The tasks include end-to-end testing of functional capabilities in the areas of logistics, personnel, health and medical, communications and intelligence. In addition, Hamre wants the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and DOD agencies to certify that they have
CIO Council issues IT investment guide
Agencies implementing capital planning processes for systems investments need to develop well-rounded approaches, the Chief Information Officers Council recommends. Agencies that have already rolled out capital planning processes generally have not used integrated approaches, the council said in a new report, Implementing Best Practices: Strategies at Work. The council's Capital Planning and Information Technology Investment Committee developed the best-practices guide and posted it on the Web at http://cio.gov.
Voice over IP services come calling on networks
Cisco Systems Inc. began integrating IBM Systems Network Architecture networks with IP networks eight years ago. Its InterWorks Business Unit now controls nearly 80 percent of the SNA router market. "We're going to be repeating that process" in bringing voice services onto IP networks, said Paul Sikorski, InterWorks product line manager for the San Jose, Calif., company.
Government users are among the first to buy Sun's mainframe-class Starfires
Sun Microsystems Inc. has reported selling more than 500 Ultra Enterprise Starfire systems since the first Starfire came out in March 1997. One government intelligence site alone bought about 20 Starfire systems, a Sun Microsystems Federal official said. The intelligence users snapped up the air-cooled Starfires for data centers as well as high-performance technical computing applications such as signal and image processing apps, said Joanne Heider of Sun Microsystems Federal's high-performance computing division.
Guard words to avoid false statement charges
Should the country adopt use of federally-issued patient identification numbers? The question has been the focus of much attention lately, as Health and Human Services Department officials begin work on a massive new system [GCN, Sept. 7, Page 82]. I want to use the issue to make a broader point about framing complicated information policy problems. No matter what kind of information system you operate, you will ultimately have to confront a challenge involving overlapping, conflicting
Wavelet image, video compression technology address file size problem
Wavelet algorithms compress video files and boost their transmission speed. Although video phones are a long way from widespread acceptance, full-motion video over standard telephone lines has started to close the gap. Universal Serial Bus and FireWire ports in PCs solve the connectivity problem, but what about file sizes? Static image files are the largest in common use on PCs, and video files far outscale them. Without some kind of automatic compression utility, video
Norton AntiVirus 5.0 lets users analyze their viruses
The research center sends out tracking info via e-mail. In addition to new ActiveX and Java detection capabilities, Norton AntiVirus 5.0 now can isolate infected files on a hard drive. Users will more easily receive analyses of unknown viruses they send to the package's vendor, Symantec Corp. of Cupertino, Calif.
Warner leads effort to gain support for bill
The Senate Rules and Administration Committee is trying to gain lawmakers' support for a bill that would dramatically change how agencies publish government documents, whether on paper or electronically. The committee earlier this month postponed a markup of the Wendell H. Ford Government Publications Reform Act, S 2288, to build consensus for the proposal, lawmakers said.
RAID subsystems
They say if you sit long enough at a cafe on the Champs Elys'es in Paris, everyone you know will pass by. I say, if you listen long enough to an information systems manager, you'll eventually hear the same lament—data by the ton and every single user wanting immediate access to all of it at all times.
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