Lori Clark

There's no such thing as a free lunch, especially for IT. Go to the state of Iowa's Web site, and you can see that of the $2.5 billion in federal economic stimulus money earmarked for the state under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), $553 million has already been spent on health, education, infrastructure and other programs designed to create jobs and jump-start the local economy. Iowa CIO John Gillespie figures his IT organization has devoted about 800 man-hours so far to making that data available to the state's citizenry. "We actually had to build the application to give [different state agencies and programs] a way to submit data to us," he says. Drill a bit deeper into the data and you can pull up the exact amounts spent on weatherization training and technical programs, rental assistance programs and hundreds of other individual projects. But the far bigger challenge, Gillespie says, has been building the business rules and defining internal processes to comply with federal reporting requirements, which have changed or been updated several times since the stimulus package was first announced in February.

Just as the $787 billion ARRA is unprecedented, so are the reporting demands it's making on state CIOs and IT organizations, which are scrambling to whip up new processes and tools to accurately track and account for their states' shares of the stimulus pie. States are required to file quarterly reports that fully account for every tax dollar spent. The process has been complicated by a variety of factors, including exceedingly tight deadlines and complex and changing federal reporting guidelines. Like so many of the energy and construction projects launched with stimulus dollars, tracking and reporting systems remain works in progress. The best state Web sites for ARRA tracking States with the best ARRA-tracking Web sites, as of July: 1. Maryland (see related story) 2. Colorado 3. Washington 4. West Virginia 5. New York 6. Pennsylvania - Mitch Betts Source: study by Good Jobs First (PDF), Washington, July 2009 Another big problem is the lack of a central accounting system in most states, which have had to first devise ways of extracting and aggregating data from multiple systems across hundreds of agencies before rolling it up to report it to the federal government.

In Missouri, one of a handful of states to have a central accounting system used across all state agencies, funding and budgeting data is relatively easy to access. Two data points the feds want to track are job creation and retention under the economic stimulus program. "But the definition and requirements for how to count jobs is quite a challenge to understand," according to Marilyn Gerard-Hartman, director of enterprise applications for Missouri. What remains difficult to grasp, however, is precisely what the federal government wants to know, says CIO Bill Bryan. For example, if the state awards a highway infrastructure project to a contractor who in turn hires a subcontractor, who in turn hires other subcontractors, "how far down the chain is the state responsible for tracking? Meanwhile, fulfilling the requirements to the letter of the federal law is critical, Bryan notes. "If you don't comply, you could get thrown under the bus and not get any further funding." "One of the biggest challenges is just the speed at which we had to get things done," says Iowa's Gillespie. "The rules for the most part didn't get finalized literally until weeks - not months - ago.

And do you only count it as a job created if the job wouldn't have existed without the ARRA funding?" Generally, "it hasn't been clear what the requirements are until fairly late in the game," adds Bryan. Just keeping up has been the biggest challenge." Rather than licensing commercial stimulus-tracking tools, Gillespie's team internally developed a tracking and reporting system "using tools already familiar to financial folks who have all the data in Excel spreadsheets," he explains. First things first But before IT could build the tracking system, "we actually had to build a Web-based application to give people a way to submit data to us," Gillespie explains. The data is imported into a database, where it is aggregated, extracted and converted to an XML-formatted report and submitted online to the federal government. Stimulus reporting: The basics More than two-dozen federal agencies have been allocated a portion of the $787 billion in stimulus money.

The federal agencies are required to file weekly financial reports on how they're spending the money and their specific activities involving ARRA funds. Each federal agency develops specific plans for its share, then awards grants and contracts to state governments or, in some cases, directly to schools, hospitals, contractors or other organizations. Last month, states and other grant recipients for the first time filed the quarterly spending reports required under the law. As Nabors puts it: "Between OMB and the vice president's office and others in the White House and out in the agencies, we've done 169 different conference calls with recipients. The executive branch has worked hard to ensure a smooth reporting operation, according to Rob Nabors, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget. There've been 170 events with state officials.

There have been seven White House forums, and there've been 20 separate Recovery Act reporting training sessions. We've had 37 different events with local government officials. That by itself is an unprecedented effort by the federal government to make sure that we get it right, and this was something that started all the way back in February." - Julia King All of this was done in a matter of weeks by a small team comprising a designer-architect, a programmer and a project manager who is the chief liaison between IT and the state's stimulus office. But given the fierce push to quickly distribute ARRA funds and get new projects up and running, traditional IT project management practices, such as having a comprehensive set of user requirements, have in some cases gone out the window. The team already had some experience from working on the state's recovery Web site, which Gillespie says has "been kind of an iterative process that has been going on since the first recovery money came out." He chalks up the speedy rate of progress on both projects to what he describes as healthy competition among states to have good reporting and great Web sites. "We wanted to be better than everybody else," he says.

In Missouri, for example, a team was in the midst of implementing Microsoft Corp.'s Stimulus360 software for tracking funding and projects when the feds issued a change in data models for reporting. "We had to move forward with plans and put things in place even though you knew [more] changes were coming," says Gerard-Hartman. Tracking and reporting how many jobs are created with ARRA funds is a prime example. Like a start-up At the newly formed Massachusetts Recovery and Reinvestment Office, Deputy Director Ramesh Advani likens the fast pace and deadline-driven atmosphere and culture to the environment of a start-up company. "When you're doing something for the first time, you deal with systems issues, people issues, deadline issues, and you come across something new every day," he says. Meeting the first federal reporting deadline of Oct. 10 required some on-the-fly tactics. "For the first round of reporting, what we have done is develop some manual templates, which we issued out to state agencies. That data will then be gathered and uploaded into a recently launched central database, then uploaded through XML to the federal system," he explains. Each agency must use the same template and also pass it on to subrecipients and vendors.

But this is only for the first round of reporting, Advani emphasizes. We want to make sure we can use the same tools and reporting database beyond ARRA," Advani says. For the long term, the state is developing an automated data-gathering and -analysis system that includes Oracle Corp. business intelligence tools, data marts and data warehousing. "We're trying not to make this a short-term solution, because ultimately we want to upgrade how we do grants management and our budgets across the board. ARRA timeline: 2009 * Feb. 17: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is signed into law. For example, funding for ARRA transportation and highway projects had a 120-day "use it or lose it" deadline.

The federal government's Recovery.gov Web site goes live. * Feb. 19: Federal agencies begin announcing block grant awards. * May 17: Agency and program plans are posted on Recovery.gov. * May - October: ARRA stimulus money is distributed to states and other recipients. * May - August: Reporting requirements and updates are developed and distributed. * Sept. 28: Recovery.gov is relaunched with geographic mapping. * Oct. 10: The first quarterly deadline for recipient reporting is reached. * Oct. 30: Recipient grant and loan data is posted. - Julia King ARRA's tight timeline and strict reporting deadlines have already driven some key process improvements in the state. But it typically took the state between 100 and 300 days to advertise projects and solicit bids from contractors. "We ended up drilling down into the system to get it down to a 40-day process, which is something we're proud about," Advani says. Going forward, the office will oversee all activities involving grants reporting, monitoring and compliance. Another long-term improvement is the creation of the program office itself. The goal is to increase overall information transparency "beyond what's expected for federal reporting," says Advani.

Before ARRA, for example, the state didn't provide electronic versions of contracts on its Web site - which is a requirement under ARRA. "Now, we'll take that technology and process new contracts through the same system so we can provide broader information on all contracts that have been awarded," he says. Maine CIO Dick Thompson says he's already been directed by a legislative committee to ensure that IT work done to meet ARRA reporting requirements is also used to increase information transparency statewide. The result of ARRA reporting, CIOs agree, is a lot like the road signs popping up that say: "Temporary Inconvenience, Permanent Improvement."

The NASA spacecraft that plowed into the moon last month have discovered what the space agency calls "significant amounts of water" on the lunar surface. Since the impact NASA scientists have been working "28 hour days" to analyze the results. NASA' Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellites (LCROSS) took dead aim and crashed into the moon On Oct. 9. The impact of the $80 million LCROSS satellites into the Lunar surface created an ice-filled a debris plume that NASA analyzed for water content. NetworkWorld  Extra: 10 NASA space technologies that may never see the cosmos NASA said scientists long have speculated about the source of significant quantities of hydrogen that have been observed at the lunar poles.

While previous space missions have found some water in the moon's dirt, LCROSS is expects to definitively answer how much water might be there. The LCROSS findings actually confirm the presence of water and are shedding new light on the question with the discovery of water, which could be more widespread and in greater quantity than previously suspected, NASA said. In the end the idea is that should the US or others ever try to establish a human outpost on the moon, the might be able to use the water present on the moon rather than having to transport it up there. Key for NASA might be that if there indeed are massive amounts of water on the moon, it could be more than enough justification into continue exploring the moon with humans – something it may or may not continue in the next 10 years. Water or more importantly oxygen from water could be used to create rocket fuel as well, enabling future space traveler to refuel on the moon or launch other explorations from there. NetworkWorld Extra: Top 10 cool satellite projects Water also holds that key to the history of the universe, NASA stated.

NASA is focusing on data from the satellite's spectrometers, which provide the most definitive information about the presence of water. If the water that was formed or deposited is billions of years old, these polar cold traps – LCROSS crashed into a southern pole region where it was -230 Celsius) could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data. NASA said it took the known near-infrared spectral signatures of water and other materials and compared them to the impact spectra the LCROSS near infrared spectrometer collected. NASA said data from other LCROSS instruments are being analyzed for additional clues about the state and distribution of the material at the impact site and once scientist to say said "lots of other stuff came out of there." He did not elaborate on what other materials are being found and said more results would come as the experiments were verified.

Research firm Gartner is projecting that 20% of households worldwide will be connected to the Internet through a broadband connection by year-end. Following behind South Korea in broadband penetration rate are the Netherlands (80%), Denmark (75%), Hong Kong (72%), Canada (69%) and Switzerland (69%). Gartner says that the United States lags behind many developed countries with a 60% broadband penetration rate, although this still ranks the United States ahead of countries such as Japan (58%), Germany (55%), Australia (55%) and Sweden (54%). Over the next four years, however, Gartner expects broadband penetration in the United States to rise rapidly, as it is projected to add 27 million new connections and hit a penetration rate 78% by 2013. If the United States is successful in adding these new connections, Gartner projects that it will leapfrog several countries that it now trails in terms of broadband penetration rate, including New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Norway. WiMAX changes lives in rural Thailand In all, Gartner projects that 422 million households worldwide will have a fixed broadband connection by the end of this year, an increase of 10.5% from the 382 million households that had a fixed broadband connection at the end of 2008. Looking further down the road, Gartner projects that 580 million households worldwide will have a fixed broadband connection, an increase of 37% over the number projected to have broadband by the end of 2009. South Korea is currently the leader in household broadband penetration, Gartner reports, as 86% of South Korean households have broadband connections. South Korea is still projected to be the king of broadband penetration, however, as Gartner predicts that 93% of South Korean households will be connected to the Web via broadband in 2013. Gartner also predicts that developing countries will add 135 million new broadband connections over the next four years, with Brazil, Russia, India and China accounting for more than two-thirds of new connections in the developing world and nearly half of all new connections worldwide.

Russian WiMax operator Yota will soon begin offering its customers a WiMax terminal that can make VOIP calls - and hand them over to a GSM network when the caller wanders out of the WiMax coverage area. However, that device cannot be used to make VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls. Last November, the company introduced a terminal from High Tech Computer (HTC) that can make calls over GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks and connect to WiMax data networks. Yota President and CEO Dennis Sverdlov showed a prototype of the new GSM phone with VOIP-over-WiMax at a news conference on the sidelines of the ITU Telecom World exhibition in Geneva on Tuesday.

It was in 2006 that Samsung first announced plans to release a dual-mode GSM-WiMax phone. Sverdlov refused to name the manufacturer of the prototype, but it was engraved with the words "not for sale" and a MAC address beginning with the code 00:1B:98, which identifies devices manufactured by Samsung Electronics. Samsung supplies Yota's network infrastructure, and on Tuesday the companies also announced they have begun testing WiMax 2.0 network equipment, based on the IEEE's 802.16m standard. Yota plans to put the first WiMax 2.0 units into service by the end of next year, a rapid rate of development for a company that only began offering service last year. The companies expect it to operate up to four times faster than the current generation of WiMax products, which are based on the IEEE 802.16e standard.

Initially the service was free, with the company finally winning a license to operate commercially in June. Three of those, like Ufa, have a population of around 1 million, while the fourth is Sochi, the host city for the 2014 Winter Olympics, said Yegor Ivanov, Yota's director of business development. It operates in three Russian cities, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ufa, and is deploying its network in four more cities. The company hopes to offer service in 180 Russian cities with a population of over 100,000 by the end of 2012, he said. The company is also expanding abroad, having just won licenses to operate WiMax networks in Belarus, Nicaragua and Peru. Yota will install around 20 base stations in each city, depending on the terrain, and aims to sign up around 5 percent of the population within its coverage area.

Yota expects to have a trial network in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua in operation by December. Although Nicaragua is poorer than Russia, Yota's existing subscription rate of US$28 a month for unlimited data with no speed cap will seem good value to Nicaraguans, he said. That will consist of just 10 base stations because the city is very flat, said Ivanov. That's because today they pay around $60 a month for a 3G (third generation) mobile data subscription at 1M bps (bits per second) with a limit of 2GB of data.

Microsoft and data storage company NetApp Inc. today announced a three-year agreement that cements what had already been years of product collaboration and technical integration. Under the agreement, the two companies will collaborate to deliver technology that includes virtualization, private cloud computing as well as storage and data management. The deal also extends worldwide joint sales and marketing efforts.

For data center administrators, that will mean a more tightly consolidated view for managing both server and storage infrastructure. "It allows them to discover their storage resources, do performance monitoring and health monitoring of the whole infrastructure," said David Greschler, Microsoft's director of virtualization strategy. That's the importance and significance of the announcement." Specifically, Microsoft and NetApp will focus their collaboration on virtualized infrastructure technology based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, Microsoft System Center and NetApp storage systems. While Microsoft and NetApp have not had a formal joint development agreement in the past, the companies have collaborated for years to more tightly integrate their products. "Does this alter or change any development plans or road map?" Greschler said. "No. We've been working on these for some time already, but this is a more formal and public commitment. Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions and alliances for NetApp, said the collaboration effort will move toward enabling better management of public and private cloud infrastructures, where - once virtualization is well established - workloads can be dynamically moved around for better utilization of assets. "It's no longer about thinking about workloads tied to specific servers, and, of course, storage plays a big role in that whole model of private cloud," Rogers said. We expect quite a bit of joint collaboration going forward."

Also, the companies will integrate storage and data management software for Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft SQL Server to improve communications and collaboration and accelerate software development and testing. "At the management layer, integrating with Microsoft Systems Center has been a very big focus for us," Rogers said. "We expect most data center admins will have a System Center Console in front of them and will want to be able to manage the entire stack: applications, the infrastructure software, as well as the storage devices.

Cisco this week unveiled a blade addition to its Nexus line of data center switches that's designed to aggregate multiple physical x86 blade servers from various vendors into a 10G Ethernet fabric. The 4000 is intended to fit inside a blade server system enclosure and aggregate multiple 1G server NIC connections into a 10G pipe for connection to and from the Nexus 5000 and 7000 top-of-rack and core switches. Cisco broadens data center ambitions The Nexus 4000 is the first blade switch in the Nexus line, which also includes the Nexus 7000 core switch, the 5000 top-of-rack switch, the 2000 fabric extender and the 1000V software-based virtual switch. The Nexus 4000 supports the same NX-OS converged LAN/SAN operating system as the rest of the Nexus family, and Cisco's MDS SAN switch line.

The Nexus 4000 supports FibreChannel and FibreChannel over Ethernet, and IP-based iSCSI or Network Attached Storage over Ethernet Data Center Bridging specifications for converged LAN and storage access from the server. This is intended to provide consistency across the data center as well as scale, high availability, fault tolerance and uniform management, Cisco says. It features a specialized ASIC for low latency and lossless operation in a virtualized environment, Cisco says. The 1000V aggregates virtual machine images from a single server while the 4000 aggregates multiple physical blade servers, Cisco says. It can work in conjunction with Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual switch, which resides on blade servers running VMware's ESX 4.0 virtualization software.

The Nexus 4000 will be sold to Cisco's OEM customers who will rebrand it and then sell it to end users. Since it is being developed for blade server vendors, Cisco says it will leave product details, availability and pricing up to those particular vendors. Cisco expects its existing base of Catalyst blade switch OEMs to purchase the new Nexus blade switch. The new switch will compete with HP's new 6120XG and 6120G/XG blade switches, and 6- and 10-port BNT switches from Blade Network Technologies, which are resold by IBM. The Nexus 4000 is a small piece of a broader strategy outlined by Cisco for its data center and FCoE initiatives. In that vein, Cisco says it plans to unveil FCoE modules for both the MDS and Nexus 7000 switches; a 16Gbps FibreChannel MDS switch; and an 8Gbps FibreChannel expansion module for the Nexus 5000 FCoE switch. As part of that strategy, Cisco is positioning its MDS FibreChannel SAN switches as evolutionary elements in the transition to unified data center switching fabrics.

These will likely come in the first half of 2010, Cisco officials said. The University of Arizona is embarking on the transformation right now. These will be piece parts in Cisco's plan to incrementally evolve data centers to FCoE by starting at the server edge/access point and deepening the immersion into the aggregation and core areas of the data center network. Eighteen months ago, the school commenced an "enterprise system replacement" project to upgrade its data center networking facilities to better support its HR, student information, financial management, grants management, business management and data warehousing applications. The school also deployed FCoE converged network adapters on the servers with plans to employ FCoE up to the core Nexus switches, Masseth says. The school needed an infrastructure to support 300 to 400 physical servers, several hundred virtual servers running ESX, and 300 Terabytes of storage across 13 different EMC arrays for 55,000 users, says Derek Masseth, senior director for infrastructure services at the University of Arizona. "Our architecture was not going to meet our needs," Masseth says, referring to the school's current infrastructure of Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches and MDS 9500 directors in the SAN. With that, the university installed three Nexus 7000s in the core and several Nexus 5010s at the top of server racks.

University of Arizona realized a 50% reduction in capital expenditures and a 30% reduction in power consumption per port with the Nexus deployment, Masseth says. The school is currently a Dell shop for its blade servers. The school is not yet evaluating Cisco's Unified Computing System to further tighten its server, storage, networking and virtualization environments but plans to give it a close look over the next year. In the meantime, the school plans to decommission its Catalyst 6500 switches from the data center. "We'd like to get to a pure Nexus data center," Masseth says. "We have a very strong desire to be on a single platform."

While surveys about security usually end up telling us about how bad people feel, a global survey released Tuesday indicates there's substantially less anxiety about Internet security, personal safety and national security than there was six months ago. More than 8,000 people were surveyed.  How scared should you be about security statistics?  The change over six months ago represents about a 15% improvement in the levels of anxiety that people feel, according to the scoring system used in the "Unisys Security Index: Global Summary," which covers the March to September timeframe.    The reason for less anxiety all around is probably that there's the sense the global economic crisis might be easing, making people less tense, a Unisys spokesman says. Concerns over security in everything from online shopping and banking to safety from computer viruses, as well as national security along with personal and financial security, were significantly down over what was recorded half a year ago for populations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Netherlands, Spain, Australia and New Zealand.

However, when it comes to Internet and personal security, people in the countries where the bi-annual survey was done showed the most worry over bank cards and identity theft, and the highest level of concern about that was evident in Brazil, the United States and Germany. On the question of whether individuals had confidence in the ability of financial services providers or local governments to protect personal information, respondents in Spain were the most concerned, while those in Belgium and the Netherlands were largely unconcerned. In contrast, those in the Netherlands and Belgium were not particularly concerned at all. A separate set of questions asked individuals whether they were ready to accept biometric forms of authentication in lieu of passwords to protect online information. According to the survey, a slight majority globally are willing, with Australia the highest at 66%, while the lowest levels of biometrics acceptance were in Germany at 50% and the United States at 58%. The survey said that was a bit of a "paradox" since adults in those countries are among the most concerned globally about online shopping and identity theft.