February 5, 2008

San Ramon Marriott
2600 Bishop Drive
San Ramon, CA

AGENDA

8:30 – 9:30       Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:30 – 10:30      Storage Virtualization: Look Before You Leap

            Speaker: Dave Truslow, Pallas International

Contrary to vendor claims, virtualization is not a magic wand solution. Virtualization has many potential benefits yet introduces additional complexity, analysis, and planning challenges. These include aspects such as workload analysis, latency, cache pollution, RAID and volume management, performance and capacity planning.  Dave’s presentation will identify risks - and techniques to mitigate risk - when planning for storage virtualization.

10:45 – 11:45    Positioning for Retirement

            Speakers: Thomas E. Bell, Retiree and Joseph Delano, Certified Financial Planner

Prior to reaching retirement, serious decisions about financial positioning need to be made to ensure that funds will be available to both retiring spouses and to heirs.  For the retirees, money is needed each month, whether the stock market goes up or it plummets.  For the heirs, money may be critically required – after taxes are paid.  Actions need to be taken many years prior to retirement in order to be positioned for achieving the needed objectives.

Attendance at the previous presentation is not necessary for this one to be useful; a quick review will be provided.  This presentation will concentrate on annuities, Social Security provisions, medical protection, techniques to cope with stock volatility (including bond ladders and mutual funds), and getting assets into forms that can be used by heirs. 

The presentation will be highly interactive, so bring your questions for a retiree and a Certified Financial Planner.

11:45 ‑ 1:00      NCCMG Business Meeting/Lunch 

1:00 – 2:00       Positioning for Retirement continued

Speakers: Thomas E. Bell, Retiree and Joseph Delano, Certified Financial Planner

This session is a continuation of the morning’s discussion.

2:15 – 3:15       “Best in Class” SAM Practices in a changing Software Industry

Speaker:  Michael Swanson, ISAM

How good is “Best in Class” and how do companies get there? While the average data center is spending substantially more today than 10 years ago for software, unit costs have fallen in half. The surge in new products during the 1990s and licensing across entire data centers created escalating software budgets that forced data centers to make drastic changes in the post-Y2K era. Customer requirements of the 1990s are no longer driving software licensing. While an average data center has reduced their software unit costs by half, “Best in Class” data centers have amazingly done the same and continue to spend less than half of the “average” data center in software costs! The nimble, mid-sized data center is no longer able to outperform the large data center and while USD $2,500 per MIP for total software costs was unimaginable in the 1990s, “Best in Class” data centers are approaching $1,000 per MIP in software costs. How did they get there?  What are the industry trends?

Updated: 05/06/2008