Kansas City Computer Measurement Group
Day 1
Focus on Storage Management

 

October 8, 2003

Lunch provided courtesy of VERITAS Software

 

Please RSVP using attached RSVP form.

 

08:00 – 08:20

 

Continental breakfast

08:20 – 08:30

 

Welcome, announcements

08:30 – 09:30

 

Optimal Storage Architecture, Clustering, and Design for Disaster Avoidance

Rob Peglar, XIOtech

09:30 – 09:45

 

Break

09:45 – 10:45

 

Storage Transport Services and Business Continuity using TCP/IP: A Case Study

Brian Heili, CISCO

10:45 – 11:00

 

Break

11:00 – 12:00

 

Storage Management: The Focus for Storage Professionals

Randy Kerns, Evaluator Group

12:00 – 1:15

 

Lunch

    Presentation by VERITAS Software:

         Application Performance Management

1:15 – 1:45

 

Networking Session

    Please take time to network with vendors and other professionals.

1:45 – 2:45

 

Storage Resource Management – Architecting a Storage Utility for Maximum Efficiency

Rick Harkins, VERITAS Software

2:45 – 3:00

 

Break

3:00 – 4:00

 

An Introduction to SAN Capacity Planning

Mark Friedman, Demand Technology Software

4:00 – 5:00

 

Midrange Server Resource Mining

Rick Keck and Tom Hatcher, Sprint

 

 


Kansas City Computer Measurement Group
Day 2
Focus on Internet Performance
 
October 9, 2003

Lunch provided courtesy of Wily Technology

 

Please RSVP using attached RSVP form.

 

08:00 – 08:20

 

Continental breakfast

08:20 – 08:30

 

Welcome, announcements

08:30 – 09:30

 

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, Web Services Are From Betelgeuse

Denise P. Kalm, BMC

09:30 – 09:45

 

Break

09:45 – 10:45

 

Virtual memory constraints in 32-bit Windows

Mark Friedman, Demand Technology Software

10:45 – 11:00

 

Break

11:00 – 12:00

 

Managing J2EE Performance for the Production Environment

Chris Farrell, Wily Technology, Inc.

12:00 – 1:15

 

Lunch

    Presentation by Wily Technology:

        Managing High Performance Web Applications

1:15 – 1:45

 

Networking Session

    Please take time to network with vendors and other professionals.

1:45 – 2:45

 

Zen and the Art of Application Performance Management

Craig Hodgins, Compuware

2:45 – 3:00

 

Break

3:00 – 4:00

 

Factors Affecting Web Performance

Tim Goeke, Global NetWatch

 


Abstracts – Day 1 – October 8

 

Optimal Storage Architecture, Clustering, and Design

for Disaster Avoidance

Rob Peglar

Corporate Architect

XIOtech Corporation

 

This presentation will discuss optimal clustered data storage architectures and illustrate solutions for disaster avoidance, tolerance and recovery.  Strategies for avoidance and recovery are outlined.  The impact of clustered storage on such strategies is discussed, as well as data backup and restore.  Replication of data is detailed and elaborated upon as an optimal strategy.  Application best practice, as well as server architecture, coupled with optimal storage strategy is outlined.  Overall architectural (server, network, storage) guidelines and best practices are compared, along with the implications for enterprise and SMB institutions, their staffs, and the financial/budgetary considerations when using dynamic clustered networked storage architectures.  A case study is given along with computation center diagrams and infrastructure.

 

Biography

Rob Peglar is the Corporate Architect for XIOtech Corporation.  A 26-year industry veteran, he has global corporate responsibility for healthcare technology, storage architecture, strategic direction, and industry liaison for XIOtech. He has served as a consultant to the Technical Council of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), is XIOtech’s principal member of the SNIA, the IP Storage Forum and the Shared Solutions Forum, and is a former member of ANSI X3T9 and the IETF.  He has extensive experience in the architecture, design and implementation of large heterogeneous storage area networks (SANs), virtual storage architectures, and is a frequent speaker and panelist at leading healthcare, storage and networking industry-related seminars and conferences worldwide.  He has led XIOtech in architecture to its current industry-leading position in virtualized networked storage.  He has a unique ability to synthesize the business goals of healthcare, government, and corporate IT with strategic storage architectures and technologies.

 

Prior to joining XIOtech in August 2000, Mr. Peglar served as Senior Consulting Storage Specialist for StorageTek for nine years, holding key field and engineering management positions. Prior to StorageTek, he held engineering and product management positions at McDonnell Douglas, Control Data Corporation and its supercomputer subsidiary, ETA Systems, for fourteen years. His research background includes I/O performance analysis, queueing theory, parallel systems architecture and OS design, and virtual systems optimization.

 

Mr. Peglar holds the B.S. degree in Computer Science from Washington University, St. Louis Missouri, and performed graduate work at Washington University’s Sever Institute of Engineering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Storage Transport Services and Business Continuity using TCP/IP:

A Case Study

Brian Heili

Systems Engineer

Cisco Systems

 

Data distribution, data protection, business continuance and disaster recovery strategies are critical components of today's information-centric businesses.  The ability to efficiently replicate critical data on a global scale not only ensures a higher level of protection for valuable corporate information, but also promotes increased utilization of backup resources, reduces the impact of a catastrophic failure at a single site, and lowers the total cost of storage ownership.  Using the IP network in conjunction with FCIP holds out the promise of a far less expensive method of reliably and accurately transferring large amounts of data over significant distances.

 

Biography

As a Systems Engineer for Cisco Systems, Brian is responsible for the development and integration of customer solutions for storage networking and IP convergence.  With over 12 years of industry experience, he is also focused on the design and deployment of large scale enterprise networks.

 

 

Storage Management: The Focus for Storage Professionals

Randy Kerns

Senior Partner

Evaluator Group Inc.

 

Storage Area Networks have become more common and the focus has now moved to storage management.  Storage Management is being intensely marketed and there are many companies offering products.  The problem is, it is unclear how the different storage management software products work together or at least complement one another to help solve problems and allow storage administration to be more effective.  There are many elements involved in storage management and how well they integrate dictates the real value to a storage administrator.  There is currently a great degree of variability with solutions in the market today and many overlapping functions.  Putting the storage management elements and the types of Storage Resource Management into context is necessary to be able to sort through this confusing maze.  Once understood, a more coherent plan for implementing storage management can be formulated.  This session will explain these elements and the factors involved.

 

Biography

Randy Kerns is a senior partner at The Evaluator Group and is responsible for Storage Area Network and Network Attached Storage analysis and education as well as company and product strategies.

 

He has over thirty years in the computer industry involved in the development of storage products for both mainframe and open systems.  His background is in product design and development.  Randy’s education includes a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Missouri at Rolla and a master’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Colorado.  He has worked for IBM, Fujitsu, as Vice President of Engineering at the Array Technology subsidiary of Tandem Computers and as Director of Engineering for Enterprise Disk at Storage Technology Corporation.   Product development that Randy has been involved in includes both disk and tape subsystems for those companies. 

 

Randy has made numerous presentations at conferences and is the author of many industry articles and white papers.

 

 

An Introduction to SAN Capacity Planning

Mark Friedman

VP and General Manager

Demand Technology Software

 

Emerging technology that allows the construction of high performance storage area networks (SANs) requires extending existing analytic frameworks that can accurately predict the performance of complex disk subsystems. This paper focuses specifically on two elements of emerging SAN technology: (1) the performance of Fibre Channel links and connecting hubs and switches, and (2) the performance of in-band and out-of-band SAN data management protocols. Traces and timings from benchmarking tests conducted with an in-band SAN data manager product are analyzed and discussed. Understanding this measurement data should enable existing disk modeling approaches to be extended to encompass this new storage technology.

 

Biography

Mark is the co-author of Windows 2000 Performance Guide, published by O’Reilly in 2001. He is a frequent contributor to CMG conferences on performance and tuning topics, concentrating on Microsoft Windows NT since 1995. In 1996, he began developing Performance SeNTry, performance monitoring software for Windows NT, also known as NTSMF.

 

He is also currently a Vice President for Storage Technology at Datacore Software, the parent company that owns Demand Technology Software. He edited an industry newsletter entitled "Mark Friedman on Storage Management," published by Demand Technology. In 1994, he founded OnDemand Software, which developed and sold the award-winning WinInstall software distribution package for Windows networks. From 1987-1991 he worked at Landmark Systems where he was the architect and the led the development team that built The Monitor for MVS.

 

 

Storage Resource Management – Architecting a Storage Utility for Maximum Efficiency

Rick Harkins

VERITAS Software

 

As we move towards utility computing, we need to address the needs and concerns of our ‘consumers.’  When faced with the prospect of resource control and sharing, end-users and managers alike hit the panic button.  Storage service levels can be defined and consistently delivered, while lowering hardware costs.  In addition, the cost of storage can be accurately allocated to the consumer, transforming that part of the IT department from a cost center to a value center.

 

This presentation will show you what is needed and the pitfalls to avoid on the path to a ‘storage utility.’

 

Biography

Rick Harkins is a Principal Systems Engineer with VERITAS Software based in the Kansas City area.  Prior to joining VERITAS Software five years ago, Rick spent 10 years administering and managing systems at a local mutual fund company and an Iowa manufacturer.  Rick started his career working with the HP3000 and spent 10 years at Hewlett Packard as a Systems Engineer, specializing in performance analysis and tuning of the MPE operating system.

 

 

Midrange Server Resource Mining

Rick Keck, Capacity Management Analyst

Tom Hatcher, Project Engineer

Sprint

 

Significant savings can be realized by mining capacity from servers that currently reside in your environment.  These servers, which range in size from very small to very large, tend to be under utilized, very scalable, and good platforms for new applications.  The fundamentals of mining capacity and methodologies to affect savings are discussed.  Server management methodologies include active and passive consolidation, low utilization elimination (right sizing), large asset monitoring and category reduction.  The methodologies discussed in this presentation apply primarily to UNIX based servers.

 

This presentation will focus on these two important questions.  First, “What tools can be used to mine midrange server capacity?” Second, “What methodologies exist for mining midrange server capacity?”

 

Biography – Tom Hatcher

Tom has twenty-five years of experience in Information Technology, with the first seventeen years working with mainframes, and the last eight years in the Open Systems environment, specifically capacity planning.  The focus of Tom’s last four years has been on server consolidation and capacity mining.  He was instrumental in developing Sprint’s server consolidation process, which has saved approximately $35M since 1999.  Tom organized and is currently leading Sprint’s Server Consolidation Steering Committee, which is responsible for establishing and maintaining Sprint’s server consolidation policies and procedures.

 

Biography – Rick Keck

Rick has 25 years of experience in Information Technology.  He has a BS degree in Computer Science and a Masters degree in Business Administration.  His experience includes project management, software design & development, web site administration, and IT consulting.  Currently he is a member of the Capacity Management group developing models to make midrange server application forecasts.


Abstracts – Day 2 – October 9

 

 

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, Web Services Are From Betelgeuse

“The only way we will really know the condition of Betelgeuse is to wait a few million years.”

Denise P. Kalm

BMC

 

Having trouble making robust legacy applications talk to hot new Web applications?  Trying to manage business transactions with your partners when everyone is running their proprietary software on different platforms?  Simple, flexible interoperability is the “holy grail” and happens to be analogous to the challenges we all face when we try to communicate with the opposite sex.  Using the Mars-Venus theme, we will explain the basics, value and challenge of creating or migrating to a Web services standard-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).  We will extend that theme to communication with people from other cultures/languages as an analogy to cross enterprises B2B Web Services.

 

Biography

Denise Kalm has more than 20 years experience in IT, most of that spent in the performance management/capacity planning arena.  Starting out on Tandems, she branched out to CICS, MVS, UNIX and began looking at network performance for a large, global bank before joining BMC Software, Inc as a software consultant.  Her current role is in technical marketing for performance products.  Her last position at the bank was as systems architect and relationship manager to Credit Card Systems.  Prior to entering the IT profession, she was a biochemical geneticist.  Her hobbies include freelance writing, Jazzercise and scuba diving.  Her first novel, Lifestorm, was published last year and she is hard at work on the next one.

 

 

Virtual memory constraints in 32-bit Windows

Mark Friedman

VP and General Manager

Demand Technology Software

 

Many server workloads can exhaust the 32-bit virtual address space in Windows Server 2003. Machines configured with 2 GB or more of RAM installed are particularly vulnerable to this condition. This paper discusses the signs that indicate a machine is suffering from a virtual memory constraint. It also discusses options to keep this from happening, including (1) changing the way 32-bit virtual address spaces are partitioned into private and shared ranges, (2) settings that govern the size of system memory pools, (3) hardware that supports 36-bit addressing. Ultimately, running Windows on 64-bit processors is the safest and surest way to relieve the virtual memory constraints associated with 32-bit Windows.

 

Biography

Mark is the co-author of Windows 2000 Performance Guide, published by O’Reilly in 2001. He is a frequent contributor to CMG conferences on performance and tuning topics, concentrating on Microsoft Windows NT since 1995. In 1996, he began developing Performance SeNTry, performance monitoring software for Windows NT, also known as NTSMF.

 

He is also currently a Vice President for Storage Technology at Datacore Software, the parent company that owns Demand Technology Software. He edited an industry newsletter entitled "Mark Friedman on Storage Management," published by Demand Technology. In 1994, he founded OnDemand Software, which developed and sold the award-winning WinInstall software distribution package for Windows networks. From 1987-1991 he worked at Landmark Systems where he was the architect and the led the development team that built The Monitor for MVS.

 

 

Managing J2EE Performance for the Production Environment

Chris Farrell

Director of Technical Marketing

Wily Technology, Inc.

 

Complex Enterprise Java systems can be very difficult to manage. When performance problems occur, any number of system resources or components could be to blame: Servlets, EJBs, CPU overhead, memory utilization, application server connection pools, the database connection or connections with any other supporting systems. If not properly and quickly diagnosed, poor application performance could negatively affect the organization's ability to serve its customers and seriously impact its revenue stream. This presentation will discuss a number of typical Java application performance problems and approaches to identifying and eliminating them. You will learn that performance problems can be address beyond a reactionary point of view as well as preventing any future performance failures all together.  This presentation will discuss the following topics:

·         Challenges in the Java environment

·         Performance issue in deployment and production

·         Scenarios samples and best practices techniques to manage performance

 

Biography

Chris Farrell has over 13 years experience in the computing industry, including three years at Wily.  Currently the Director of Technical Marketing, Chris was previously Wily's Director of Product Management, coordinating the development and initial launch of Introscope, Wily's flagship product.  Prior to Wily, Chris was the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Ericsson mobile phones, directing Product Marketing for the Ericsson Open professional tennis tournament.  Chris spent ten years at IBM, most recently as the Product Manager for the Wireless Web Software Suite and Segment Manager for IBM Global Services Field Service Solutions.  Chris' technical background includes BIOS development in the IBM PC Company as the lead software engineer on several ThinkPad systems and the first Intellistation. Chris has a BSEE and MBA from Duke University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zen and the Art of Application Performance Management

Craig Hodgins

Systems Engineer

Compuware

 

Application performance management is just as important, if not more so, than systems performance management. APM is a distinct and vital area of concern to IT organizations. This paper will present a roadmap to help such organizations move through an application performance maturity model that moves from chaos to kaizen, providing hints and tips at each stage of progression. And maybe a little Zen, too….

 

Biography

Craig Hodgins has been employed in the IT industry for over 22 years, 18.5 years with IBM Canada and 3.5 years with Compuware.  He has worked in various capacities, but believes the most fun and interesting work is found in performance management.  Craig is currently a Systems Engineer for the STROBE product.  Craig spoke at CMG 2002 in Reno, and has had two articles published in Enterprise Systems Journal.  Craig lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife and three children.

 

 

Factors Affecting Web Performance

Tim Goeke

Chief Technology Officer

Global NetWatch, Inc (GNW)

 

Web performance is affected by many factors.  How do the combinations of browser, web server, and online application software combine to produce good, or bad, performance?  This talk will focus on different aspects of high performance web sites, and different approaches to achieving maximum performance and reliability when designing web infrastructures and hardware.

 

 

Biography

Tim Goeke is Chief Technology Officer at Global NetWatch.  Prior to this position with GNW, Mr. Goeke was with US WEST as a Software Engineer and Prism Resources as a Senior Software Engineer.  In both of these roles, Tim designed, developed and implemented various Internet, Intranet, client/server and Windows based systems applications.  While with Prism, he was an integral part of the team that developed an online stock trading system, patent-pending Internet Subscription Access system.  Eventually, the entire online trading system became the cornerstone of Ameritrade, Inc., a leading online trading company.  Additionally, Mr. Goeke has held various designer, programmer and technician positions within the computer industry.  Tim holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Computer Science, Physics, and Math from University of Nebraska-Lincoln.