November 4, 2008
Sponsored by Compuware Corporation
4733 Chabot Drive, Suite 100
Pleasanton, CA 94588
8:30 – 9:30 Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:30 – 10:30 Business Service Management, the End User, the Business and IT
Speaker: Tom Halinski, Compuware Corporation
Service level management (SLM) and business service management (BSM) are current "hot topics". Discussions about them center on 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 EUE based on SLM, BSM, and how both are used to align IT with the business.
10:45 – 11:45 Performance Management with Free and Bundled Tools
Capacity planning and performance management tools have been commercially available for many years. A new generation of freely available tools provides data collectors and analysis packages. As the underlying computer platforms and network devices have evolved, they have added improved data sources and have bundled free data collectors. Several open source and freeware projects have sprung up to collect and display cross-platform data, and with the advent of highly functional free statistics and modeling packages comprehensive analysis, modeling and archival storage can now be assembled. Free and bundled tools are of special interest to sites with very diverse mixes of systems, very large sites where licensing costs become prohibitive, and sites replacing a few large single systems with many more low cost horizontally scaled systems.
1:00 – 2:00 A Load Balance Index - the Missing Metric
The use of parallel homogeneous servers is ubiquitous in modern IT systems. A lack of balanced workloads can have a serious impact on system performance and limit available capacity. A significant amount of time and money is spent on load balancing systems. Some form of load balance index is often used internally in operational systems that attempt to balance workloads dynamically. However there is no commonly used metric to track and report the effectiveness of load balance efforts. A load balance index has been developed by using ideas from other areas such as cost accounting and network optimization. This concept is not limited to just web servers it is also relevant to storage, networks, virtual servers and other areas.
2:15 – 3:15 Techniques for Reducing Data Center Power Consumption
In our last NCCMG meeting, Frank Bereznay discussed how Kaiser measured server power consumption in their data center. Now that you've identified which servers use the most power, what are the alternatives for reducing power consumption?
Please pre-register by contacting Keith McAndrew at (916) 715-8352 or keith.mcandrew@sun.com by Friday October 31, 2008. Registration is $25 at the door.
Report from the August 2008 meeting:
Speakers: Mark Bramfit, Frank Bereznay, Rick Ralston and Stephen Guendert
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, 2009.
Reminders! 2009 REGIONAL NCCMG MEETINGS:
February 3
May 5
August 4
November 3
Updated: 01/20/2011