May 6, 2008

Carr America Conference Center

4400 Rosewood Drive
Pleasanton, CA 94588

Sponsored by Sysload Software Corp.

AGENDA {new as of 5/4/08}

8:30 – 9:30       Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:30 – 10:30      Performance Management In The VMware World

                        Speaker: Emmanuel Sauvion, Sysload Software Corporation

Virtualization and VMware are hot topics today but both come with challenges: how do we initially identify candidate servers for virtualization; how can we be sure that our servers and applications will "fit on a same box?"; did we really make the optimal choices; how can we ensure smooth behavior of our pool of Virtual Machines and ESX hosts; how can we fully understand the impact of applications on physical resources as these applications move from a physical server to another?  During this presentation we will answer these questions along with the ultimate question; how to keep users happy while saving money in our optimized VMware world.

10:45 – 11:45    Visual Diagnostic Language (VDL) for TCP/IP Trace Analysis

Speaker:  Nalini Elkins, Inside Products Inc.

Reading and understanding a TCP/IP packet trace is difficult, even for diagnosticians with many years of experience.  What if we could 'see' the trace flow in visual symbols?  Finding a problem on the network is a matter of pattern analysis.  Where does the good pattern fail?  Is a bad pattern established? Humans are quite adept at pattern analysis. In particular, the part of the brain which does visual pattern analysis is far older than the part of the brain which analyzes written symbols such as numbers and text.  In this session, the speaker will show how to use the VDL for diagnosing and seeing the patterns for the following:  normal data flow; TCP start up and shut down; TCP errors (dup acks, out of sequence, fragments, retransmissions); congestion window and timing problems.  This technology is patent pending.

11:45 ‑ 1:00      NCCMG Business Meeting/Lunch/vendor presentation provided by Sysload Software Corp.

1:00 – 2:00       Managing the Customer Experience

                        Speaker: Jon Schmidt, Transaction Design, Inc.

This presentation will focus on how to monitor and manage the service the customer is receiving.  ATM, point of sale, ecommerce, loyalty, and other customer-facing systems are critical to a company's success.  These systems also may be very complex, and dependent on other systems inside and outside the organization.  Jon Schmidt, creator of Transaction Design, Inc.'s Ban Bottlenecks(R) service, will discuss how to manage the service provided to the end-user as well as the service received from back-end systems and services

2:15 – 3:15       Business Service Management (BSM)

                        Speakers: Tom Halinski, Compuware

One of the key challenges facing service providers and enterprise IT organizations alike is the drive to become "aligned with the business."  From both the IT and business perspectives, it is a change from being a “cost center” to that of being a “revenue generator”. 

Much ado has been made over the past few years about service level management (SLM) and business service management (BSM) and how they increase the overall quality of services provided by IT to the business, and how they guarantee the levels of those services. SLM principles, while still relevant, continue to be used primarily in governing the contracts between external service providers and their customers. The key ideas behind BSM involve guaranteeing the quality of services provided to the business, which is a very different concept than SLM. This presentation will discuss SLM, BSM, and how both are used to align IT with the business.

Please pre-register by contacting Keith McAndrew at (916) 715-8352 or keith.mcandrew@sun.com  by Friday May 2, 2008. Registration is $25 at the door.

Report from the February 2008 meeting:

Call for speakers in 2008. If you are interested in speaking, call Cathy Nolan at (925) 675-5308 or (925) 890-8390.

If you have not attended a meeting within the last two years, you will be deleted from the mailing list.  To remain on the mailing list, either attend one meeting or email cathy.nolan@bankofamerica.com by November 1, 2008.