Q&A: US Dept of Defense Ike M.

Gaamil March 17, 2012

Area of Consideration (Facts) World largest government department with an annual budget of $550 billion. employs 700,000 civilians and around 2.5 million soldiers DoD has played a pioneering role in information technology since 1949. Its research arm, DARPA, invented the precursor to the Internet, ARPAnet. The DoD has not escaped one of the most crippling afflictions in enterprise IT siloed legacy data sources. DoD Giant project called DIMHRS (Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System), which was designed to be a single integrated personnel system that could access all the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps human resources databases around the world. But these were all static relational databases, and the cost and complexity of connecting them was extremely high. The services couldnt agree on any shared definitions, and the database schemas that they used were changing even as we were trying to connect them together. But these were all static relational databases, and the cost and complexity of connecting them was extremely high. The services couldnt agree on any shared definitions, and the database schemas that they used were changing even as we were trying to connect them together. After 11 years and about $1 billion had been spent on the project, it became clear that the interconnection problems were never going to be solved. In January 2010, former deputy secretary of defense Gordon England cancelled the DIMHRS programme, just as he announced he was leaving office. They came across something called data virtualization. This means when you run a query, you reach into your authoritative data stores and aggregate it together in real time. The data doesnt persist its only there while you answer your question. But data virtualisation uses translations you translate the data into a common definition when you run the query. Every time you do one of these translations it consumes processor cycles, and you end up with a very slow system, so we looked for other ways of doing it. Someone suggested about semantic technology, which was developed in the 1990s by DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] for the intelligence community, which has the job of gathering and analysing both structured and unstructured data from around the world, in as near real time as possible.

In semantic technology, the record of all meanings is the ontology, which is made up of RDF [Resource Description Framework] triples. They are called that because they have three components: the subject, the predicate and the object. The technology called SPARQLizer, which converts SPARQL, the query language for RDF, into SQL, the query language for relational databases. So you run a query based on the definitions in your ontology, and SPARQLizer converts it into a SQL query and it goes into the relational database. The first proof of delivery, they set up a four-year plan and a detailed two-year plan. The plan has two parts: the first is building the ontology and keeping up to date with state-of-the-art semantic technology, and the second is looking at new business problems to solve. When new data sets are created using these RDF triples, the cost of building and accessing these large data stores just has to go down. That will lead to faster decisions we need to make now, and more certainty in decisions we have to make for the future.

Problems Technological The giant project at the Department of Defense called DIMHRS (Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System), which was designed to unify the human resources databases of the various military services took 11 years and $1 billion before being scrapped as a failure.

Alternative Course of Action Data Virtualization Semantic Technology

Evaluation of each ACA Data virtualization is a methodology that takes a layered approach to dealing with huge volumes of data from disparate sources. The phrase virtualizations used because data virtualization is the aggregation of the data from disparate sources, including databases, systems and storage, to create a single virtual view from within a front-end systems Benefits of Data Virtualization 1. Consolidation- Combine 20 or more servers into one. Not only do you save a bundle in hardware costs, but you'll see tremendous gains in. 2. Energy Efficiency- Less hardware means less power consumption. One of the main reasons many top enterprises have been able to cut their power costs so dramatically over the past few years is virtualization. Cutting down on hardware also improves.

3. Resource Utilization- Virtualization allows you to use more of what you already have, pushing capital expenditures further into the future. 4. Management- In order to reduce complexity and risk while improving productivity, an organization should manage physical and virtual environments holistically together in the same way. Management is a key component of a converged infrastructure ensuring that customers can move beyond server virtualization with confidence and to extend its many benefits across the data center. 5. Provisioning- Virtualization presents two key challenges as it applies to application management -- understanding the impact of resource sharing and ensuring that adequate resources are provided to support existing and new application workloads. The key to streamlining application environments is to first determine how the four core resources -- CPU, memory, disk and network -- support applications in the context of meeting performance, availability and service level objectives. 6. Resource Allocation/Load Balancing- Virtual servers that are well-managed provide customers with a fluidity of resource pools that enable rapid response to varying workload requirements. This results in a reduction in operating costs and increased productivity, allowing organizations to focus on services that deliver business value and not just keeping the lights on in the data center. 7. Automation - Through a seamless automation platform, companies are able to leverage the benefits of virtualization as well as execute faster provisioning of infrastructure or applications. Automation solutions can replace laborintensive processes with consistent, automated workflows that can save thousands in workflow costs and reduce the risk of error. 8. The Cloud- Once you've gone virtual within the data center, it's only a matter of time before you extend those capabilities to the outside world. Whether you opt for internal, external or hybrid cloud services, none of it is possible without the ability to virtualize physical resources. 9. Disaster Recovery- A virtual environment can be up and running much faster than a physical one. As long as physical infrastructure is intact, provisioning and automation systems can have service restored in a matter of minutes. Not only does this improve recovery point objectives, but it lowers the overall cost of getting back on your feet. 10. Storage, Networking, the Desktop and Beyond- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) provides an alternative solution for traditional desktop environments, providing IT teams with the flexibility to quickly deliver and refresh desktops, reduces the threat of potential data loss or theft, lowers the complexity and cost of desktop management, and provides end users with the functionality of a standalone desktop. Semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and content files, and separately from application code. This enables machines as well as people to understand, share and reason with them at execution time. With semantic technologies, adding, changing and implementing new relationships or interconnecting programs in a

different way can be just as simple as changing the external model that these programs share. Semantic technologies create knowledge because they encode the relationships between information separately from information itself, the data base, or from computer programs that use the knowledge, the applications. Traditional information technology codes the relationships between the data and applications directly into the programs that use and manage it. Benefits of Semantic technology to enterprise: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Modern, Back-end Data Federation Universal Solvent for Structure Adaptive, Resilient Schema Unmatched Productivity Natural, Connected Knowledge Systems

Conclusion Semantic Technology would be a great help for the implementation of US DoD project. Semantic technology will support data interoperability and business intelligence. US DoD leverages Semantic Technology across systems to meet the goal of having an executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture. They can use the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard by OMG for their Business Process Modeling efforts, in conjunction with systems built on RDF, OWL, and SPARQL.