MidwestCMG

Wednesday April 23, 2008

What you need to know about this meeting (FAQ):

8:30 AM	Registration and Coffee in the Lake House Room on the 14th Floor
9:00 AM	Opening - Welcome – Margaret Greenberg, MCMG President
9:15 AM	Death to Dashboards: Alarming, Performance Management Based on Variance, System Prioritization and Other Thoughts on Data Visualization Peg McMahon, Sprint Nextel When does the light on the executive dashboard turn from yellow to red? When do you order new hardware? Traditionally, these decisions are handled by setting thresholds — picking some number to use as an upper or lower limit. Thresholds might have worked well in the days of a handful of beloved systems. But for today’s complex environments, thresholding is not only painful to manage but conceptually bankrupt. Let’s talk about the problems with thresholds and dashboards and work to identify some practical alternatives. Vendors, put on your iron underwear and attend this session.
10:30 AM	Morning Break
10:45 AM	Storage Analysis and Modeling John Baker, Intellimagic If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. This phrase is no more true than in the world of mainframe I/O performance. Despite impressive breakthroughs in disk subsystem technology, there remains a substantial disconnect (pun intended) between the logical and physical view of our I/O infrastructure. We will discuss how architectural changes have shifted the most likely bottlenecks from the host system down to the Disk Subsystem components and why new levels of visibility and automation are required to avoid painful service level issues. This session will discuss the challenges involved in managing enterprise disk subsystems in a mainframe environment, how RMF metrics may actually mislead us into believing that things are running just fine, and how the old rules of thumb no longer apply. A new methodology and complementary new metrics will be introduced and discussed.
11:50 AM	Election of New Officers for MCMG Dan Schwarz, Secretary The bylaws of MCMG require an election at the first meeting of every year. At this meeting, we will elect these officers for two-year terms: Secretary Treasurer 2 Directors The Board is responsible for forming policies and procedures used at MCMG including meeting topics and formats, rules and procedures. We are always looking for fresh input for our organization. MCMG is a volunteer-run organization. Please participate. We need your skills and involvement to keep MCMG strong. If you would like to submit a nomination or be nominated yourself for one of the positions, please send an email to mcmg_elections@cmg.org (note that there is an underscore between “mcmg” and “elections”). If you choose to nominate one of your peers, an MCMG Board member will contact the nominee for consent.
12:05 PM	Lunch in Brio on 15th floor
1:15 PM	zAAP Utilization Case Study, BMO Financial Group Jonathan Gladstone, Bank of Montreal In 2004, IBM introduced zSeries Application Assist Processors, or zAAPs, to their zSeries line of mainframe computers. These new specialty engines run Java workloads on the mainframe at greatly reduced cost. In 2005, after testing and technical and business case analysis, the BMO Financial Group (a.k.a. the Bank of Montreal) started using zAAPs. This presentation describes some of the high-level issues and benefits of using zAAPs in a mid-sized mainframe shop with significant Java workloads. It also touches on BMO’s use of System z Integrated Information Processors (zIIPs), the newest mainframe specialty engines from IBM, which handle a subset of DB2 workloads.
2:30 PM	Afternoon Break
2:45 PM	Virtual Tape Russ Prokuski, EMC EMC Disk Library for mainframe (DLm) is a new solution from EMC that offers IBM zSeries mainframes customers the ability to eliminate the need for mainframe tape libraries from the data center completely. From shortened batch processing windows to improved data retrieval to lower operating costs, the benefits of the DLm are considerable. In addition to classic backup and recovery, mainframe environments use tape for extended online storage of information such as billing records and call center data. With DLm the retrieval of information is reduced from the minutes it would take to retrieve it from tape to seconds it would take to retrieve it from disk. DLm combines low-cost ATA-protected drives, hot stand-by disks with tape emulation and hardware compression and the functionality necessary to provide enterprises with a high-capacity mainframe tape replacement solution for delivering increased application availability.
4:00 PM	Meeting Adjourned

Location:

Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza (click for map)
350 North Orleans Street
Chicago, IL 60654

Note: Please come to the 14th floor. All meeting events, including breaks and registration, will be in the
Bull’s Head Room. Lunch will be served in the Brio Room on the 15^th floor.

If you are parking in the garage, be sure to bring the ticket to the reservation desk to be stamped. The fee
will be $14; otherwise, an unstamped ticket will be charged at the daily rate.

Directions:

MAP Quest Map with Directions to Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza

CTA Downtown Map

METRA System Map

Cost:

Preregistration:	$ 85.00
Walk-in registration:	$100.00

Preregistration helps significantly with planning.

Registration:

Preregistration must be received by Wednesay, April 16th.

Please include the following information with your registration:

Name and Title
email Address
Company Name
Company Address
Business Phone Number

Payment:

You can now make payment by Visa, MasterCard, Discover or using your Pay Pal account
through Pay Pal by clicking on the "BuyNow" button below and following the directions:

Or by sending payment to:

Gary Schneier, Treasurer
MCMG
P. O. Box 1061
Morton Grove, IL 60053-1061

Questions/concerns:

Contact Mr. Jon Keister, who will be glad to answer your questions via phone (847-276-1224) or email: jon.keister@caremark.com.

Return to Midwest CMG 2007 meetings page.