Category Archives: tech

Disaster Recovery, State & Local, virtualization

Reaching Out to Other Schools to Make Virtualization a Better Fit

While virtualization may be too much for smaller schools to bite off on their own, collaboration with other school districts, universities, or other learning institutions can make it more accessible. It can also raise the value of the pay-off of virtualization to everyone. But it requires planning and some standardization to really get the maximum benefit for all.

Take, for example, the K-12 Disaster Recovery Consortium (DRC), launched by Alvarado Independent School District’s Executive Director of Technology Services Kyle Berger. Berger purchased storage virtualization technology from Compellent, but soon realized that he wasn’t able to get the same sort of disaster recovery benefit as large private sector customers.

“Big businesses that have storage area networks have them replicating across their businesses’ locations around the world,” he said. Because of the threat of hurricanes hitting the Gulf coast of Texas, Berger said, he saw a need for disaster recovery capabilities to support not just his schools, but school districts further south in the state. “We wanted the ability to offload those school districts in case of emergency,” he explained. “I had a fellow IT director in the southern part of the state whose disaster plan was actually unscrewing his racks, putting them in a truck, and driving them north.”

Read the rest at the Virtual Integrated System Blog.

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Army, Lockheed Martin, Sensors, tech

Q&A: CERDEC's Charlie Maraldo on C4ISR On-the-Move '09 and the Persistent Surveillance Testbed

At last month’s C4ISR On-the-Move Event ’09 exercise, the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Command (CERDEC) hosted an additional event – the Persistent Surveillance Testbed, run out of Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst. In addition to the Lockheed Airborne Multi-Intelligence Lab, CERDEC tested two other ISR platforms – an internal electronic intelligence and electronic warfare project called Sledgehammer, and a prototype acoustic Hostile Fire Indicator (HFI).

Last week, I spoke with Charlie Maraldo, a special projects manager with the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD) at CERDEC about the Lockheed AML test and the other elements of the Persistent Surveillance Testbed. Here’s the transcript:

Charlie Maraldo : Today, we can network disparate types of systems — sensor systems, e/w systems, ISR systems and ingest their data into DCGS A, normalize it on a database that is then accessible via other tools that are out on the data enterprise, and then allowing that information to be either posted or pulled or otherwise sent down to warfighters, you know. right down to the edge. That was our objective, and AML was a part of that, and a big part. So let’s talk about that for a little bit.

So, Lockheed Martin has a CRADA with RDECOM and I2WD, and as part of that CRADA we have an ongoing technical exchange of information with them. They made us aware several months ago that they were developing a testbed capability, which was the AML. It’s a capital asset of theirs — we don’t have any control over or can tell them what to do with it — it’s a solely Lockheed Martin entity. But we talked about ways that we could cooperate using it, and one idea was to have them participate in the C4ISR on the move demo, as a sub element of our Persistent Surveillance Testbed capstone demonstration that we were running at I2WD, which was part of the c4isr on the move e09 demo. So that’s what we did.

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