Briefs

Virginia and New York are the lead investors of government storage technology, according to an assessment of state and local government purchasing behavior released by CDW Government Inc.The assessment, called the Technology Investment Curve, maps potential state, county and city government customers against four years of CDW-G customer data. In this third installment of the investment curve, CDW indexes purchases of storage technologies. The analysis includes backup software, storage software, storage-area networks, network-attached storage, tape backup and drive arrays.Virginia leads the states with a storage investment profile 625 percent higher than the average, and New York follows with an investment profile 621 percent higher than the average.The Navy has asked the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) to help plan new Navy and Marine Corps networks as a follow-on to existing networks, including the Navy Marine Corps Intranet. The Marines also seek contractor support for their Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) requirements.The work done by CNA for the Navy Department will be the foundation for the follow-on contract to NMCI, the Marine Corps said in a Feb. 26 request for information. The center will also provide an analysis of future capabilities that NGEN must provide to ensure that it will support the department's business and warfighting operations beginning in 2010.Besides NMCI, the Marines want the NGEN contractor to review other existing networks, including the Marine Corps Enterprise Network; the Navy ONE-NET, which serves overseas locations; and the shipboard IT21 network and potentialfollow-ons.The Homeland Security Department has established a new coordinating group to manage information sharing with state, local and tribal fusion centers.About 15 employees are working on the project at the Liberty Crossing Building at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va., said Lora Becker, the group's director.