8:30-9:00 Registration / Breakfast

9:00-10:00 "Anything Worth Having is Worth Cheating For – Capacity Planning with Solaris System Resource Manager"

UNIX time-share schedulers have a loophole that is bad for enterprise server management because it favors greedy users with many small processes. Solaris 2.6 Systems Resource Manager (SRM) introduces a new paradigm that constrains the scheduler to be 'fare' to all users. This talk will introduce the SRM scheduler principles of operation and present guidelines for capacity planning using share allocations. A comparison with IBM's Workload Manager (WLM) in Goal Mode will take us into the second talk.

10:00-10:10 Break

10:10-11:40 "The WLM Velocity Metric Demystified (A Work in Progress Report)"

If you don't really understand what a performance metric means, it's probably difficult to tune the system effectively. As many OS/390 MVS practitioners are already aware, the Velocity metric introduced with MVS Workload Manager in Goal Mode in SP5.1.0 is very confusing and many 'best practices' talks have been given at CMG to help analysts understand velocity and tune their systems. I have not found any of these explanations satisfactory. In this talk I will explain why 'velocity' is NOT a velocity and give an alternative representation using a simple model of the Ready Queue dispatcher. In this way, we see immediately what WLM is trying to do when you assert e.g., Velocity goal = 50. Finally, I explain why Velocity would better be called EXECUTABILITY. I am also looking for feedback from the audience on how this explanation might be improved for CMG National.

11:40-11:50 Break

11:50-12:30 Vendor Presentation: "Software Assett Management (SAM) Strategies and Tools"

Isogon can help you take control of skyrocketing software costs with proven, user-oriented software asset management solutions. Come see the latest features in SoftAudit/ONE, the only auto-discovery tool for OS/390 (MVS) that gives you an accurate picture of the software products on your system. And, find out how Isogon's Client Services can help ensure a complete asset management solution for your shop.

12:30-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:00 "Capacity Planning For The Internet Age"

As technology has become more integral to business, the means to communicate with customers has become critical. Print/mail, voice communication, and web services are now integral to electronic commerce -- for advertising, transactions, and fulfillment. They require capacity planning at least as much as the computers and disk space of classical concern. For fulfillment, extranets and mail operations are likely necessary, and the internal infrastructure must support growth rates that are astounding. Techniques, tools, and bitter experience will be described.

3:00-3:15 Break

3:15-4:30 "Random Processing On Tape"

In the beginning, all data processing was batch, systems programmers wore bell-bottoms, grew long hair, and said "groovy". It was a kinder, gentler world; the music was good. That was in the beginning. With the explosion of disk, tape backup grew to dominate and disco was cool. With the advent of note-and-point, we started random processing on tape. I turned to jazz. Random processing on tape has historically been restricted to programs like HSM. In order to utilize high-performance high-capacity drives, soon random processing will predominate all tape processing. For example, virtual tape systems transform batch into a backup component and a random component. We examine the performance envelope of modern tape drives and other implications of this direction.