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Connecticut Computer Measurement Group
Summer CCMG Membership Meeting & Agenda
Radisson Hotel, Cromwell - Friday, June 10, 2005

Summer CCMG '05 Agenda      The Speakers

The Summer of 2005 is expected to be hot, dry, and slow. Well, you can not blame the Connecticut Computer Measurement Group's latest venture, the Summer Membership Meeting. There are four excellent speakers who promise interesting discussion and thoughtful ideas that we can all take back to our workplace. Interleaved Open Systems and Mainframe topics allow us to learn and expand our personal knowledgebase throughout the day. Connectcut CMG wishes to thank Metron-Athene for their generous sponsorship of this meeting's Continental Breakfast and Refreshment Break.

Agenda:

7:45-8:15 Registration & Coffee
8:15-8:30 Introductory Remarks & Business Agenda Sponsored by Metron-Athene
8:30-9:45 Consolidation and Virtualization: More things in fewer places
Rich Fronheiser - Metron
The introduction of distributed systems brought about a huge growth in the number of systems to be managed. In addition, they were often geographically spread and managed outside the central IT department as user departments sought autonomy. The more the numbers of servers proliferated, the more it became obvious that effective management of the systems required a move back to centralized control. Economies of scale were possible from consolidating onto a smaller number of larger systems, reducing the pockets of spare capacity that had been created throughout the organization. A move back to larger central systems and the advent of virtualization means that some of the older performance management techniques have become relevant again as decisions need to be made about buying more expensive and larger hardware systems that may be running multiple or virtual copies of operating systems. This paper talks about some of those techniques and talks about some of the challenges involved in consolidation.
9:45-10:00 Break - Refreshments Sponsored by Metron-Athene
10:00-11:15 WLM Known Unknowns
Jim McCoy - IBM
You've read the manuals, been to the web sites, heard a lot of presentations, yet there still seems to be a number of things you just don't know about because you don't know you should know about them. They are documented somewhere but it beats the heck out of you where that was (and even if you did find them it didn't make much sense anyway). In this session I discuss many of these various WLM features and functions, how they work and what do they do.
11:15-12:30 The Performance Impact of Security Attacks on Enterprise Computing Systems
Dr. Pierre M. Fiorini - University of Southern Maine
This session considers the following issues from enterprise performance assurance perspective: 1) How can performance analysts and capacity planners assess the impact on the performance of applications during a security attack? and 2) How systems can be designed and configured so that Quality of Service (QoS) objectives can be met during a security attack for mission critical applications. We develop analytic techniques that can ascertain performance measures for a wide class of computing systems when security attacks occur.
12:30 - 1:30 Lunch (Provided)
1:30-2:45 Implementing zAAP Processors - A Customer Experience
George Handera - Aetna
This presentation visits the considerations associated with implementing zAAP processors. It is a first step in moving JAVA work off of the zSeries general purpose processor and onto a separate, lower cost, zSeries application assist processor (zAAP). Topics included in the presentation: runtime considerations related to management of the zAAP engines from the HMC; effects when altering with the CONFIG command; developing a philosophy in managing resource consumption via PARMLIB parameters and the effect on the TRQ. Also discussed are reporting and projecting demand in zOS 1.6 (where to look and what to look at), SDSF, RMFIII, RMF Post Processor, and Xifa parameters with their use in projecting demand. The author will discuss some of the benefits achieved post-implementation of the zAAPs.
 
2:45
Closing Remarks
 
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About the Speakers:

Rich Fronheiser is a principal consultant for Metron-Athene, Inc. He has been a distributed capacity planner and performance analyst for the past decade, working full time in the utilities, transportation, and insurance industries. He has a BS in Mathematics from Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA, and will complete an MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in December. He fills much of his free time working as a baseball umpire, basketball referee, and a football referee at the high school and college levels. Rich lives in Madison, WI, and he and his wife have a four-month-old daughter, Casey.

Jim McCoy is a Consulting I/T Specialist Advanced Technical Support for e@Server zSeries Performance Management at the IBM Washington Systems Center. He has 31 years in the industry. For the last 18 yrs with IBM, 11 are in the WSC, the last 6 working in the performance area specializing in WLM and EWLM. Previously, Jim worked in the Parallel Sysplex group of the WSC for 5 years. Prior experience in IBM was in field technical support. Jim has presented at SHARE and z/OS EXPO multiple times over the years and is the IBM representative to SHARE for the Enterprise Wide Performance and Capacity project.

Dr. Pierre M. Fiorini is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern Maine. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Connecticut in Computer Science & Engineering, and a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Trinity College (CT). His private industry experience includes employment at Andersen Consulting, BCBS/CT, Sikorsky Aircraft, BMC Software (formally BGS Systems), and Comverse Network Systems. His interests include queuing theory, computer performance, and artificial Intelligence. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, and CMG, and is also on the board of directors for the Greater Boston CMG (GBCMG).

George Handera has over 25 years of data processing experience that ranges across application development, DB2/MQ Subsystem support, performance management, systems architecture and capacity roles at Aetna. He has also worked independently creating and selling the copyrights to several mainframe products. George updated us last meeting on the virtues and complexities of coupling devices.

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