Midwest CMG

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 Meeting

8:30 AM

Registration and Coffee

9:00 AM

Opening - Welcome – Greg Scriba, MCMG Program Committee

9:15 AM

How Two Guys Manage Performance Monitoring for 287+ Servers
Chuck Moore, CBOE

Mr. Moore will discuss how CBOE staff uses Best/1 to rapidly collect
system performance statistics from the servers (in less than 20 minutes)
with assistance from Control-M and custom scripts, printudr, sqlldr, and
SAS.  Over 50,000 performance charts are available to CBOE on a simple
custom website.  This information should be extremely useful to those
who are interested in beefing up the performance of their web reporting. Perhaps this presentation could best be titled: Mainframe Guy Successfully Meets Server Challenges.

           Presentation

10:30 AM

Morning Break

10:45 AM

Solving Network Backup Dilemmas

Brian Diven, Northwestern Mutual

Richard McKay, Datalink Corporation

Mr. Diven has extensive experience working with storage.  He will be discussing Veritas NetBackup issues.  His presentation will be very current and contain many real life stories for your edification.  If you have been struggling with similar challenges, this presentation should be helpful to you. 

12:00 PM

Lunch in Merchants on the 14^th Floor

1:15 PM

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Storage Area networks (SANs)
Vern Rubenic, CORE Technology Services, Inc.

Monitoring and troubleshooting storage area networks (SANs) by establishing performance baselines and root cause analysis: In today's economy, 24x7 business processes demand that network data be continuously available.  Ensuring SAN availability and minimizing downtime while maintaining cost effective return on investment (ROI) is the ultimate goal.  With multiple vendors, components, and no current standards in place, understanding what is actually going on in your SAN environment is challenging at best.  Currently, there is a need to have end-to-end monitoring of the entire SAN fabric -- not just the switches.  In this session, we will look at some of the reasons for this pressing need and the different methodologies that embrace strategies for effectively monitoring and diagnosing the SAN. 

                                    Paper                         Finisar Website

2:30 PM

Afternoon Break

2:45 PM

Configuration and Deployment of a Residential Web Server
Dr. Bernard Domanski, The City University of New York – CSI

Many of us have older PCs that still work but have been replaced with
faster, bigger behemoths.  Often, the kids or Aunt Sophie is the recipient of
these working dinosaurs.  This How-To presentation will take you through
configuring your dinosaur to be a fully functional web server that is
absolutely on the Internet, is fully legal, and will cost you absolutely
nothing but a little bit of time.  So if you have Windows, have an account
with an ISP, and can think of what you would do with your own web
server, this is an absolute must-attend! 

                Presentation                  Paper                 Apache Download Site

4:00 PM

Meeting Adjourned

Brian Diven

Brian is a known and authored specialist with tape and backup/recovery abilities.  Brian was a huge proponent of being able to recover anything at any time prior to the WTC disaster and has vendor and end-user experience.  He is coming to us today as an end user.  Brian has 27 years in the business and has an interesting story bouncing between end-user and vendor relationships. 

Richard McKay

Richard has over 20 years of experience in the open system environment as a high-end technical designer and consultant.  Richard has designed and implemented solutions at many Fortune 500 companies.  This includes backup solutions without vendor preference.  Richard has also designed and configured large fabric HA AN/TAN designs and fully redundant storage solutions. 

Vern Rubenic

Mr. Rubenic has been contracting independently for 9 years.  He began his practice performing UNIX centric works, transitioning to storage disciplines.  He most recently completed a lengthy project architecting and implementing a geographically distributed production storage infrastructure for a new stock exchange based in the Midwest.  Prior to his most recent engagement, Mr. Rubenic architected SAN and UNIX technologies for other exchanges, financial institutions, and publicly traded clients while strategizing, implementing, and mentoring staff.  Prior to consulting, Mr. Rubenic was the Lead UNIX Administrator for a well-known futures exchange in the Midwest, routinely working with developers and business units to create and improve all aspects of the exchange.  Mr. Rubenic started his technology career in the US Navy as an Electronics Technician in 1980, ending his Naval career in 1988 as a 1^st class Technician and Certified Instructor qualified to instruct theory and practical curriculum ranging from communications to radar.  Post military experiences include 5 years with Northrop – DSD with titles of Sr. Technician to CAE Support Specialist, working with industry leading “E” CAD design and simulation software. 

Chuck Moore

Mr. Moore has a Bachelor’s Degree from DePaul University in C.S. with concentration in Database and Data Analysis.  Since April 1, 1999, he has been a Capacity Engineer at CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange).  He has responsibility to ensure that all CBOE systems have sufficient capacity and that performance meets the expectations of business units of interest.  His experience includes work with these various systems: TPF running on Amdahl Millennium 2000 series mainframes; MVS running on Amdahl Millennium 700 series mainframe; Solaris servers = Sun and Fujitsu, ranging from 220R to 6800 and Fuji 250's to 1500's; AIX servers = H50's, H80's, M80, 615's, 630's, 650's, 550's; HP/UX servers = K's, N's, V2600; Linux servers = Opteron; Windows NT/2000 servers; and Stratus Fault-Tolerant servers.  Mr. Moore is a computer performance professional who is aggressively seeking new ways to advance the performance and reporting mechanisms in the environment at CBOE. 

Bernard Domanski

Dr. Domanski has been involved with computer performance and capacity planning for many years.  In 1992, he won CMG’s A. A. Michelson Award in recognition of the technical excellence and professional contributions found in only a few professionals in the field of computer performance evaluation.  He served as President of CMG in 1996-97.  He has authored many CMG papers and participated on panels.  Currently, he is a professor at The City University of New York - CSI where he is actively involved in creating a new generation of computer professionals.  Each and every one of his presentations is filled with humor and good technical information. 

Preregistration:

$70.00

Walk-in registration:

$95.00