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Connecticut Computer Measurement Group
Summer CCMG Membership Meeting Agenda
Radisson Hotel, Cromwell - Friday, June 15, 2007

Summer CCMG '07 Agenda      The Speakers

Conn CMG presents our Summer Meeting again in Cromwell. Performance Management is the theme of the day, and several companies are tackling it in new ways. First, Rob Strechay of Akorri will share his thoughts on the impacts to Performance Management processes from the virtualization of storage and servers—what you manage now will be a logical representation that’s somewhat removed from the physical layer. Gregory Dawe of RSA Security describes his company’s efforts to build Software Performance Engineering (SPE) into their application development processes—some wins, some losses accrued. Denise Arruda (FM Global) returns in the afternoon to describe her attempts to ensure that the testing database is adequately populated for performance considerations. And finally, John Bartlett of NetForecast, Inc. describes a handy measurement indicator, the Apdex method, that can be understood by the end-user as well as Performance Management. He proposes that the Apdex standard be adopted by more customers and tool vendors alike.

Our thanks to NetIQ, for sponsoring the Continental Breakfast and Refreshment Breaks, to help keep down the price of admission to our CMG events.



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We have invited speakers from our own regional CCMG as well as National CMG. Today’s speakers are experts in their fields and outstanding representatives of CMG.

Agenda:

8:00-8:30 Registration
Continental Breakfast – sponsored by NetIQ
8:30-8:45 Introductory Remarks & Business Agenda
 
8:45-10:00 Application Optimization Trends in a Virtualized Environment

Rob Strechay – Akorri
 
10:00-10:15 Break – Refreshments sponsored by NetIQ
10:15-11:30 Creating a Software Performance Engineering Team

Gregory Dawe – RSA Security 		   
11:30-12:30 Lunch (Provided)
12:30-1:45 Database Bloating Architectures

Denise Arruda – FM Global 		   
1:45 - 2:00 Break - Refreshments sponsored by NetIQ
2:00 - 3:15 Performance Management Using Apdex

John Bartlett – NetForecast, Inc.
3:15
Closing Remarks
 
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About the Speakers:

 

John Bartlettis Vice President of NetForecast, leads the technical committee of the Apdex Alliance and is a leading authority on application performance and network technology. NetForecast helps enterprises assess and improve voice, video, and data application performance. Mr. Bartlett has helped design more than 40 products and 50 networks. He directly contributed to the development of a number of international data communications standards.


Denise Arruda is a Senior Performance Analyst with FM Global, where she is responsible for defining, evaluating and assuring the performance of custom .Net applications. Denise has been in the IT industry for over 18 years. Denise began her IT career as an applications developer, before becoming an application performance analyst in 1999. Denise received her undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts in Computer Science, and received a Masters of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of New Haven.


Greg Dawe is a Senior Manager at RSA, the Security Division of EMC. He is currently responsible for the Core Engineering Servcies team. This includes RSA's Performance Competency Center (PCC). Greg is accountable for delivering services that help RSA's developers build high-quality, high-performing software products efficiently and quickly. Greg has worked in the ISV field in various capacities for 20 years, having worked as a developer for Prime Computer, Stratus, Wellfleet, and Computer Vision. Since 1997 Greg has held management and leadership roles in post sales technical support for Raptor Systems, Axent Technologies, and RSA Security. In 2004 Greg accepted the challenge of building RSA's first Performance Engineering team.


Robert J. Strechay, Jr., is a Director of Strategic Planning at Akorri, Inc. He has spent most of his professional career as a director level IT professional with responsibility for all aspects of corporate storage services, disaster recovery planning, networks and operations. For Akorri Mr. Strechay leads strategic and tactical marketing and sales support initiatives. Before joining Akorri, Strechay served as director of storage and disaster recovery for a Fortune Global 200 financial services company, where he was responsible for their strategic and tactical roadmap for their storage infrastructure and disaster recovery planning initiatives. He writes and is quoted regularly by press and is a member of multiple standards organizations.

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Agenda:

8:00-8:30 Registration & Coffee
8:30-8:45 Introductory Remarks & Business Agenda Sponsored by NetIQ
8:45-10:00 Application Optimization Trends in a Virtualized Environment
Rob Strechay – Akorri
Enterprises employ virtualization to manage complexity, but this also makes it more difficult to understand how the infrastructure actually supports applications, troubleshoot performance problems, and predict the impact of change and growth. Performance is an end-to-end challenge, and must be managed cross-domain, even while making best use of virtualizing technologies. In order to effectively manage cross-domain, enterprises need to be able to “realize” the virtual logical objects – discover and properly visualize their relationship “assignment and alignment” to physical objects, and quantify the “flow” through them. This “realization” enables analysis, planning, optimization, and troubleshooting.
This session provides a framework for how to look at the entire data center holistically to improve IT’s ability to manage performance in a virtualized environment. Learn how analytics will play a big role in enabling IT organizations to correlate and manage across domains.
10:00-10:15 Break - Refreshments Sponsored by NetIQ
10:15-11:30 Creating a Software Performance Engineering Team - Lessons Learned
Gregory Dawe – RSA Security
A common complaint in the software industry is that performance and scalability work is done largely after the fact. How does creating a Software Performance Engineering (SPE) team solve this problem if the challenges lie beyond SPE team? This presentation offers an interesting bottom-up approach to creating an effective SPE team inside an ISV where the engineering processes have not historically considered performance. Influencing, alliance, recruiting, progress measurement, communication, and spending strategies are discussed.
11:30-12:30 Lunch (Provided) - Lower Mezzanine
12:30 - 1:45 Database Bloating Architecture
Denise Arruda – FM Global
In application performance testing it is important to simulate the production environment, usage and other characteristics. The closer one can simulate the real world, the better one can predict the performance and understand the risk. There are many aspects that impact the performance of an application. Each aspect must be analyzed in order to design a series of performance tests that best simulates the production application. This presentation will take a closer look at one of these aspects: the size and composition of the database. Whether you are testing a new application that does not contain large amounts of data or testing the future scalability of an exiting application, database bloating is required. How the database is bloated can have a significant impact on the performance of an application and understanding the risks. I will present considerations and techniques for designing how to bloat a database for application performance testing.
 
1:45 - 2:00 Break - Refreshments Sponsored By NetIQ
2:00 - 3:15 Performance Management Using Apdex
John Bartlett – NetForecast, Inc.
The Application Performance Index (Apdex) is a numerical measure of user satisfaction with enterprise application performance that shows how effectively IT investments support business objectives. Apdex is an open standard that is managed by the Apdex Alliance. It provides the simplest language by which businesses and IT departments can discuss requirements, set expectations, and define operating agreements. Apdex represents the next stage of application performance management (APM) evolution. Attendees will learn the technology and process layers that build APM best practices. It will show how the Apdex methodology it’s a foundation for ongoing IT quality improvement.
3:15
Closing Remarks
 
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