Next-Generation Data Center – Building a Framework that Enables Virtualization and Cloud Computing Initiatives

The federal government is in the early stages of adopting private and public clouds as a way to make government IT more flexible, elastic and scalable – optimizing efficiency and reducing costs. With the support of the Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a draft definition of cloud computing to be used across all agencies. Additionally, the General Services Administration (GSA) issued a Request for Quotation for cloud and virtual machine services as a preliminary step towards an online storefront to be used by federal agencies for ordering cloud computing services.

Federal Computer Week, in partnership with Brocade, will host an executive breakfast titled, “Next-Generation Data Center – Building a Framework that Enables Virtualization and Cloud Computing Initiatives” on January 21, 2010 at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C. This executive-level educational breakfast for IT professionals will bring together senior government officials, federal architects and industry executives to discuss current and emerging technologies, connectivity challenges and best practices for implementing an intelligent, integrated data center in a high-performance virtual environment.

Attendees of the breakfast will learn:

• How key government agencies are successfully addressing and embracing virtualized and cloud initiatives
• Considerations for virtualization and cloud ready datacenter design
• Technology decisions that must be made today to build a framework for tomorrow’s architecture
• Keys to enable virtually unlimited IT infrastructure scalability
• Increased mission flexibility through a globally distributed and accessible IT infrastructure
• Why connectivity is the key to supporting virtualization and cloud computing
• How to build an architecture to support your agency’s data center and provide the “enabling” layer for server and storage virtualization with built-in intelligence
• Effective ways to get the most value from your data center’s technology investments
• The path from virtualization to cloud computing to the next-generation data center