More then just specifying a technical mandate like "must use virtualization" which will probably be as effective as the "must use TCP/IP v6" mandate.

It seems to me that we should really say recovery.gov should be the poster child for the government getting into the "productively leveraging technology" game.

Traditionally the US Gov has only really been a successful early IT adopter via NSA or NASA, and actions such as this National Dialogue give me hope that may change.

I agree with both the idea and the comment.  The infrastruture needs to be cloud-like however the Recovery.gov implementation is probably not the best choice to deploy some of the latest cloud technologies. 

My reasoning ... This has to work on a large unpredictable scale.  As I think of all the functional and non-functional requirements plus use cases that need to be taken into consideration there is too much potential risk to make use of some of the latest technologies either from my company or others.

In this case, though maybe not a popular choice, Recovery.gov needs to choose a hosting vendor or infrastructure company who has the experience and equipment to handle the massive amounts of data, bandwidth, processing, monitoring and the unpredictability that will ultimately arise in this deployment.  I am bias to my company as I have personally worked on these types of projects with success in the past but that does not undermine the point that Recovery.gov does not have the luxary to wait on emerging technology to mature.

Closing comments:

I have not seen anything where anyone can say Recovery.gov is similiar to very active web sites like EBay, Amazon, UPS etc.  To me, as an Infrastucture guy, creating the right foundation (infrastructure) will allow for Recovery.gov to grow and contract the environment as needed to take advantage of some of the fantastic ideas on this forum.

While I like the idea, the implementation by the various government and commercial organizations would be governed by their internal IT architecture standards.  These architecture standards may not yet include server and workstation virtualization.  The existing physical technology may not yet support virtualization. 

So the implementation of ARRA-supporting information systems (hardward, software, databases) and terminology (database designs and organizational semantics) would need to be organization-specific - unless a virtualization solution (technology, data syntax, terminology/semantics) is prescribed from the top.  This prescriptive solution is unlikely in today's currently fragmented Federal Management culture and structure (hint - there is no unifying Federal or National terminology with management life cycle).