AGENDA

Portland Area Computer Measurement Group (PACMG)

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

8:30-4:00 p.m.

Location: Con-way Incorporated

Address: 2055 NW Savier Street

Adtech II Building, Glen Jackson Conference Room

Portland, OR 97209

8:30-9:00 a.m.	Breakfast and Registration Continental Breakfast provided by BMC Software
9:00-10:30 a.m.	The Apdex Index Revealed The Apdex Index is a single number intended as a high-level indicator of application responsiveness. Are you using it? Though it is promoted by the Apdex Alliance (http://www.apdex.org/index.html) as a single number, simple enough to be easily understood by executive managers, others of us see that there is more to it than meets the eye. Several in-depth presentations were given at CMG 2008. Did you know about them? In addition to briefly reviewing those presentations, I will reveal how the Apdex response-time information can be applied in a way different from that promoted by the Apdex Alliance. Neil Gunther, Performance Dynamics	Link to presentation is here
10:30 – 10:45 am	Break
10:45-11:45 a.m.	A KALM APPROACH TO CAPACITY PLANNING -ROAD RULES Don’t have time to read through manuals and books, trying to ferret out best practices for capacity planning? Learn the KPRs (Kalm Performance Rules) based on years of just doing the performance and capacity planning job, keeping my lines of business up and running well. By learning how this approach evolved, and what worked for me, you can craft your own “best practices” and work smarter, not harder. Denise Kalm, Computer Associates	Link to presentation is here

11:45 – 1:00 p.m.	Business Meeting and Lunch Lunch provided by Computer Asociates
1:00 – 2:00 p.m.	Green Computing There's a lot of hype in the market about "green", but what does it really mean in a technology context? How can we define and measure the technical and financial impact of the environmental footprint of information technology systems? How can we reduce environmental footprints while measuring our results? Darin Briskman, IBM	Link to presentation is here
2:00-2:15 p.m.	Break
2: 15- 3: 45 p.m	Mongo Measurement Requires Mongo Capacity Management The A.A. Michelson+ Award is named in honor of the first American to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 1907; except he was born in Prussia, not America. He received the Nobel Prize for designing and performing the most famous null experiment in physics. It required a 2-ton stone table, sitting in a pool of mercury, buried in a basement. Today, we can do the same thing on a silicon chip. The Michelson-Morley experiment is not the only null experiment in physics, it's just the most famous one, because its failure to measure the predicted "aether" (yes, same as in "ethernet") ultimately revolutionized physics. Other null experiments have tried to measure the predicted "Fifth Force" and magnetic monopoles, just to name a few. The latest in this long line of "Where the hell is it?" experiments is now under way at CERN in Switzerland---the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). The predicted entity is called the "Higgs field" or "Higgs boson" or simply "The Higgs." You've read about it on the Web. The difference between Michelson-Morley and the LHC is the shear scale of the equipment and the computing power needed to collect and analyze the data that it will generate: 15,000 TB per year! And once this fire-hose is turned on, there will be no stopping to ask, "Um, how should we manage this?" Neil Gunther, Performance Dynamics
3: 45-4:00 p.m.	Final Remarks