Connecticut Computer Measurement Group
Spring CCMG Membership Meeting & Vendor Day Agenda
Radisson Hotel, Cromwell - Friday, April 13, 2007

Spring CCMG '07 Agenda      The Speakers

Connecticut CMG is proud to present another spectacular Membership Meeting at its Annual Vendor Day on April 13th. We have a combination of invited speakers, including the winner of the “Best Paper Award” at the International CMG Conference in December. Several themes dominate the day, encouraging you to sharpen your skills and knowledge in virtualization planning, interpretation of z/OS features, and service management. These are presented in our dual-track format for mainframe and open systems topics, side-by-side in the morning. And in between sessions you can learn from several vendors delivering specific solutions in the fields of storage, network, and enterprise systems management, as well as training solutions, here in the Northeast

Each April, CCMG invites vendors to display their products and services to our membership in addition to the technical presentations from invited speakers. This opportunity to engage in discussion with the vendors occurs during registration, between sessions and after lunch. We welcome the following vendors and thank them for their support:

About the Speakers:

Frank Bereznay is a long time member of the Computer Measurement Group and an active volunteer at the national and regional level. He, and his wife Shana, have supported the Southern California region for more than 20 years.

Frank is currently with Kaiser Permanente, a large vertically integrated provider of health care services. He supports the National Information Technology Business Unit and is helping to implement an Electronic Medical Record application for the more than 8 million members who receive healthcare services from the Kaiser program. Previously, Frank was at the Automobile Club of Southern California for 13 years and held a variety of Data Center management positions.

Richard Talaber has 23 years of extensive experience managing mission critical systems and optimizing service levels for large organizations including MCI. While at BMC Software, Rich was the General Manager of BMC Services focused on helping companies implement large-scale open systems methodologies. He next served as CIO of a major Internet company where he guided them through a large consolidation project resulting in significant ROI. Rich then embarked on several successful entrepreneurial ventures culminating in his founding Asset Optimization Group (AOG) in 2001 focused specifically on capacity planning and performance tuning helping companies simplify complex environments and improving service levels. AOG was purchased by VMware in 2005 and is an integral part of VMWare's current software offerings.

Rafael Garcia has been in the IT business for 24 years and has held various positions. He was a COBOL and CICS® Developer, an Application Development Manager and a DB2 Applications DBA for one of the top 10 banks in the US. For the last 10 years he has been a field DB2 Technical Specialist working for the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory supporting DB2 for z/OS customers across various industries, including migrations to data sharing. He has an associate's degree in Arts and an associate's degree in Science in Business Data Processing from Miami-Dade Community College.

Bill Shelden has over 37 years of experience working with performance and capacity planning issues of computer systems, primarily large main frame systems. Bill spent the first 21 years of his career as an IBM Systems Engineer. Later he co-founded The Information Systems Manager, Inc. (ISM) and still works for ISM as a Senior Product Manager. Bill has a B.S. in Mathematics from Lafayette College and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts. Bill is especially interested in both analytic and simulation modeling of computer systems.

Brenda Iniguez is a seasoned IT Support Professional, with over 20 years proven experience in Fortune 100 companies, designing, building, consolidating, and managing their Enterprise Support Centers. In addition, she is ITIL Service Manager certified, and is well versed in the Service Management disciplines of Incident, Problem, Change, and Availability Management. Brenda is now Director with Pink Elephant, based in the SF Bay Area, leading Business Development for the Western US.

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Agenda

07:45-08:15 Registration and Coffee

08:15-08:30 Introductory Remarks

Mainframe Performance Track

08:30-9:45      A Performance Analyst's Guide to RMF Type 70 records
                      Bill Shelden - The Information Systems Manager, Inc.

The evolution of the performance data in the RMF type 70 record is described from the earliest MVS systems running on uniprocessors to current z/OS systems running in logically partitioned systems, on CPUs with various types of CPs, in LPARs with shared and dedicated logical processors under the control of Workload Manager using the functionality of the Intelligent Resource Director. Techniques for analyzing and reporting on some of the metrics in the RMF type 70 record are discussed along with techniques for using the data to address issues of CPU contention and latent demand. This paper has been updated since its presentation at CMG 2007 to include include information on IBM's Specialty Engines (zAAP & zIIP).

9:45 - 10:15      Break

10:15-11:30     What's New in DB2 9 for z/OS?
                       Rafael Garcia - IBM

Rafael will discuss the latest news about DB2 for z/OS V8, which has been generally available for over three years now. He will briefly discuss the new IBM System z9 Integrated Information Processor or zIIP and new z9 processors. Then the discussion will move to DB2 9 for z/OS, which has just become generally available. Data definition on demand extends the theme of online schema revolution from V8. Additional Unicode enhancements continue the work from V7 and V8. XML work across the DB2 family is a much larger step than in V7 or V8. SQL Procedures become more consistent across the family. While V7 and V8 removed many differences from DB2 for Linux, UNIX & Windows, DB2 V9 for z/OS takes the next big step to improved consistency. Utility enhancements help with new function, more LOB and XML support, better performance and improved availability, removing the BUILD2 step from online reorg. The vision for V9 is to enhance DB2's ability to handle new and enterprise applications. V9 improves the ability to handle new applications with XML, large objects, and many SQL and security improvements. V9 builds upon and extends DB2 traditional strengths and the ground-breaking V8 in many areas: online schema evolution, Unicode, XML, DB2 family SQL, utilities, security and 64-bit virtual storage.

Open Systems Track

08:30-9:45       VMWare Sizing & Consolidation
                      Richard Talaber - VMWare

The presentation begins by presenting key findings from configuration and performance data collected in over 1500 companies around the world. The data suggests that many server resources are underutilized, but also demonstrates resource ratios and how standard configuration of hardware resources must change in a virtualized environment. Although any load can technically be virtualized, the session will help attendees understand how to navigate through political, technical, security and privacy concerns when developing and implementing a virtualization strategy. During the second half of the session, a consolidation exercise will be demonstrated where real data is used to develop an implementation strategy. The session walks the client through identification of servers that are not optimal virtualization candidates, identifying resource pools of capacity, developing capacity requirements for these resource pools, selecting hardware destinations for the capacity and load balancing the resource pool loads across the target capacity.

9:45 - 10:15      Break

10:15-11:30      Some Issues in Modeling VMware ESX Server
                       Bill Shelden - The Information Systems Manager, Inc.

Two approaches to modeling VMware ESX Server are presented. The focus is on how the two model designs reflect the impact of changing the number of virtual CPUs in virtual machines running under VMware ESX Server from the point-of-view of CPU throughputs and response times. Some benchmark results appearing recently in the literature are used to validate the preferred model design. Some problems with the interpretation and modeling of virtual machine CPU utilizations as measured by Windows guest operating systems are also discussed.

11:30-12:45             Lunch - Lower Mezzanine -
                        Dessert and Coffee served in the Vendor Area Combined Sessions

12:45 - 2:00      Did Something Change? Statistical Techniques to Interpret Service and Resource Metrics.
                       Frank Bereznay - Kaiser Permanente

In a perfect world, one would always know the answer to that question. Unfortunately, nobody works in a perfect world. This paper will explore statistical techniques used to look for deviations in metrics that are due to assignable causes as opposed to the period to period variation that is normally present. Hypothesis Testing, Statistical Process Control, Multivariate Adaptive Statistical Filtering, and Analysis of Variance will be compared and contrasted. SAS code will be used to perform the analysis. Exploratory analysis techniques will be used to build populations for analysis purposes.
** This paper received the J. William Mullen award at the 2006 CMG Conference in Reno, Nevada.. * *

02:00 - 2:30                       Break - Vendor Area Open - Raffle Drawings for Prizes

(Be there to win!)

02:30 - 3:45       Availabilty, Capacity & ITSC ... Risk Management in Disguise
                       Brenda Iniguez - Pink Elephant

Today's reality is that if IT Stops, then business stops! The availability and reliability of applications, systems and technology directly impacts internal and external customer service, as well as the overall reputation of the business. There are numerous cost and quality benefits to having well structured processes in place for Availability and Capacity Management, and IT Service Continuity - all of which contribute significantly to an overall effective risk management program. The good news is that ITIL's IT Service Management Process Model includes guidance for the best practices needed. This presentation will provide valuable insight into the right and wrong way to approach the business complexities associated with risk management and the key service delivery processes of Capacity, Availability, and IT Service Continuity Management that you can apply to your own organizations.