Notes from the February 27th Meeting

By Dan Schwarz

To the group of 60 who attended the February 27th MCMG meeting, thank you very much for your participation. We appreciate your efforts in taking time from your workday and dealing with the traffic, the snow, and the construction to get to the meeting. We hope it was worth your while. To those of you who couldn't attend, we missed you, and you missed an excellent meeting. The evaluations showed consistent high marks for the presentations as well as the content of the "web day" topics.

This was Henry's last day as the Chairman, a position he has held since the beginning of time. Rick Ralston represented the entire group when he presented Henry with a plaque and thanked him for his many years of leadership.

There were three superb presentations. Kicking off the morning session, Glenn Anderson of IBM Learning Services presented WLM Management of OS/390 Web Servers. Then Don Zeunert of Candle Corporation finished up the morning by taking us on a tour of Monitoring UNIX Applications from a z/OS

Perspective. In the afternoon, Marilyn Kanas of Keynote Systems talked about the Fundamental Laws of Internet Performance. We may be able to post the presentations on our website (http://regions.cmg.org/regions/mcmg/index.html), so check for them next week.

We also held elections for MCMG officer positions.

The results are:

Chair

Donna Folkerts

dfolker@us.ibm.com

Immediate Past Chair

Henry Steinhauer

h1steinh@hewitt.com

Vice Chair

Janet Bishop

janet.bishop@anixter.com

Secretary

Dan Schwarz

dan.schwarz@hosp.wisc.edu

Treasurer

Sue Rohr

sue.rohr@infores.com

Web Master

Rick Ralston

richard_s_ralston@whirlpool.com

Program Directors

Margaret Greenberg

Greg Scriba

greenberg_margaret@hotmail.com

greg_scriba@bmc.com

Board Member

Marge Falendysz

mjfalend@myexcel.com

 

The Board expects to appoint a representative to the CMG Advisory Board. If you are interested, please notify Donna Folkerts.

 

We received many suggestions for future topics:

MVS topics

DB2 data sharing - performance tuning

Coupling Facility - performance implications

Unix monitors and management tools

Web Server performance monitoring, control, and tuning

MQ and other middleware technologies

Capacity and performance for z/OS WebSphere and Linux on z/OS

Internet load testing

Load testing software, WebSphere tuning (Peter Enrico)

Demos of load testing software for web applications

MICS vs. IBM's Performance Reporter

SAN vs. NAS - presentations ending with a panel (functionality, performance, metric collection, reporting)

IP transaction collection and reporting methodology

We will pass these suggestions to our new Program Chairs for consideration. Please reply directly to Margaret and Greg with any suggestions you would like to add. We want to present the program that you want to hear.

After the meeting, we kicked around some ideas about various meeting locations. We might want to take advantage of an offer of a meeting facility near Milwaukee; and one of our members suggested that we might be able to use a meeting room in their downtown location for up to 70 people.

This would take some effort to coordinate scheduling and catering. Marge Falendysz has offered to assist with this planning.

After some organizational planning, the new Board will post the dates of our future meetings on the website, and Janet will notify you by email. If you have any changes to your email or employment information, send a note to her.