Midwest CMG

Friday October 20, 2006 Meeting

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Agenda:

8:15 AM	Registration and Coffee
8:45 AM	Opening - Welcome – Donna Folkerts, MCMG President
9:00 AM	Using SAS Graph on z/OS to Display Performance and Capacity Data Richard S. Ralston, Humana Healthcare This presentation will provide an overview of using SAS graph on z/OS to create and present performance and capacity graphs. Standard line and bar charts are briefly presented. How to make and use heat charts, which allow the display of large amounts of information, will be the principle focus. Attendees will be anxious to take this information home and create graphs to amaze their management with picture perfect isolation of performance trouble spots. Link to Presentation
10:15 AM	Morning Break
10:30 AM	Build a Home Computer Lab, Change Your Life and Save the Earth Robert D. Andresen, MQSoftware This presentation might more aptly be titled “Lessons Learned in Acquiring Hardware and Software to Recycle Retired Equipment and get OJT.” Everybody wants to get the dish on how badly something can go wrong in simple reworking. The CMG2006 abstract: As IT technologies continue to change and evolve, it can be difficult to keep skills current. Training classes alone won’t help build new expertise. Unless technicians are able to keep working with the new technology, knowledge gained in a class can be quickly forgotten. Companies are selling equipment that is no longer powerful enough to run production workloads, but is quite serviceable to learn new technology. Mr. Andresen will explore options for obtaining hardware and software to set up a small home network to build expertise. Attendees can learn how to keep and advance in their current job or find a better one. Link to Presentation
11:45 PM	Lunch
1:00 PM	The Minimum Daily Adult - The Right Metrics & the Wrong Metrics Denise P. Kalm, CA, Inc. (formerly Cybermation) In capacity planning and performance analysis, we are inundated with metrics that purport to measure performance, but how we display them and understand them is what matters. Many metrics we take for granted are actually not that useful, and yet, permeate our world. Understand why the same-old, same-old metrics aren’t good enough, and what works better in this brief paper. As a bonus, she will give a short update on job scheduling tips and tricks, Workload Automation - What’s in it For Me? Link to Presentation
2:15 PM	Afternoon Break
2:30 PM	Did Something Change? Using Statistical Techniques to Interpret Service and Resource Metrics. Frank M. Bereznay, Kaiser Permanente In a perfect world, one would always know whether and what changed. For those of us who don’t, this presentation will explore statistical techniques used to look for deviations in metrics that are due to assignable causes (as opposed to the period to period variation that is normally present) Mr. Bereznay will explain and analyze Hypothesis Testing, Statistical Process Control, and Analysis of Variance. He will provide attendees with SAS code to perform the analysis and detail with suggested reporting packages. Exploratory analysis techniques will be used to help build populations for analysis purposes. Link to Presentation
4:00 PM	Meeting Adjourned. Please consider attending Mark Friedman’s NaSTEC 20 session on The Reality of Virtualization for Windows Servers at this time. Mark highlights several important capacity planning considerations that arise in the virtualization technologies that are currently available for the Windows server platform. He begins with a discussion of the virtualization technology available today. Then, he discusses the appeal of virtualization to address the proliferation of under-utilized Windows servers, which is widely perceived as a significant system management problem. He takes the somewhat contrarian view that this problem is not the profligate waste of resources that the evangelists for virtualization suggest it is, nor is virtualization the most direct approach to its solution. After providing a realistic assessment of the virtues of current virtualization technology, the he then tries to identify the situations where virtualization technology can be employed most effectively. As a reminder, Mark is the CMG2005 Michelson award recipient. This is a no-miss session for those of you interested in virtualization and who cannot attend CMG2006. YOU Will need to register with NaSTEC to attend. Link to Presentation Link to Paper

The Speakers:

Richard S. Ralston	Rick has 32 years of experience in data processing, 28 of those years have been focused on mainframe performance and capacity planning.
Robert D. Andresen	Robert Andresen is a Systems Engineer with MQSoftware. He has been working in performance management and monitoring for several software companies since 1997. He has been working with Linux since 1995. He is a co-author of the IBM Redbook: Linux on IBM @server zSeries and S/390: Systems Management. He holds a degree in Mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology. At MQSoftware he supports Q Pasa! and Q Nami!, which provide business transaction assurance and middleware management. His areas of expertise include UNIX/Linux, Windows, Websphere MQ, Message Broker, z/SO, CICS, DB3, and Networking.
Denise P. Kalm	Denise Kalm has 30 years experience in IT including application programming, enterprise systems management and performance management/capacity planning at Pacific Telephone and Bank of America. She moved to vendor land in 2000, spending 5 ½ years with BMC on the EPA product line, then recently became the senior product marketing manager for enterprise job scheduling products at CA, Inc., formerly Cybermation. She is a regional officer of CMG, has held many volunteer positions within that organization and is a frequent contributing author. Prior to entering the IT profession, she was a biochemical geneticist. Her hobbies include flying, Jazzercise, writing and scuba diving. Her book, Lifestorm, on the Oakland Hills fire, is available on Amazon. She is an executive and personal coach as well, offering phone and in-person coaching.
Frank M. Bereznay	Frank Bereznay is the Manager of Capacity Management Services for Kaiser Permanente, a large Health Maintenance Organization headquartered in Oakland, California. Prior to joining Kaiser, Frank was with the Automobile Club of Southern California for 13 years as the Data Center Manager. Frank is a long time member of CMG who is currently the Regional Chair of the Southern California Region. He has previously served as Treasurer and Director for the National Organization. He has also been on the organizing committee for over a dozen of the International Conferences.

Location:

Sheraton Chicago Northwest Hotel
3400 W. Euclid Ave.
Arlington Heights, IL 60005
Phone: 847-394-2000

Lunch will be served.

Directions:

Directions to Sheraton Chicago Northwest Hotel

METRA System Map

Cost:

Pre-registration:	$ 85.00
Walk-in registration:	$100.00

Pre-registration helps significantly with planning.

Registration:

MCMG members can register for NaSTEC 20 by going to http://www.NaSPA.com/nastec. Use discount/promo code 0344 - this will entitle you to attend NaSTEC free. Take advantage of this wonderful opportunity for two days of education at a very reasonable rate.

View the NaSTEC 20 sessions at - http://www.naspa.com/index.php?q=nastecSessions

Pre-registration for MCMG must be received by Thursday, October 12th.

Please include the following information with your registration:

Name and Title
e-mail Address
Company Name
Company Address
Business Phone Number

Make the check out to MCMG and send your registration to:

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

Mr. Schneier will be glad to answer your questions via phone
(847-673-4815) or e-mail: MCMG_Treasurer@cmg.org.

Return to Midwest CMG 2006 meetings page.

For changes, problems, or corrections to this web page, please e-mail Mike Hines (mshines@purdue.edu).