SCMG Meeting Raleigh
October 26, 2004

Location:

Host: Jay Brookover
First Citizens Bank
100 East Tryon Road
Raleigh, NC 27603

Agenda:

Speakers:

Tom Thompson
As Principal Technologist for OPNET Technologies, Tom is responsible for providing overall end-to-end performance and capacity solutions for enterprise customers, with emphasis on mainframe and server capacity planning. He is an IBM veteran with more than three decades of delivering performance and capacity solutions to major IBM customers. As a consultant in the IBM Global Services SNAP/SHOT organization he leveraged leading-edge methodologies, modeling, and analysis techniques to meet demanding customer requirements. Today he leverages a broad range of experiences to continually enhance OPNET solutions for enterprise customers.

David Redinbaugh
For the past ten years, David has worked in mainframe performance or capacity planning for Federal Reserve Information Technology (FRIT) in Richmond, Virginia in both processor and storage areas. In addition to projecting equipment acquisitions, he publishes an annual capacity plan that encompasses all capital spending for information technology at FRIT. David spent ten years working for Amdahl as a systems engineer before joining the Federal Reserve.

Claire Cates
Principal Systems Developer - SAS Institute, Inc. Claire has been with SAS Institute for almost 20 years. During this time she has been involved in the development of many areas of the SAS System. For the past 7 years she has worked primarily on software performance and resource usage. Using 3rd party and in-house tools, Claire has been able to locate inefficient algorithms and recommend changes in order to improve overall system performance.
BS Computer Science – NCSU
MS Computer Science - University of South Carolina

Abstracts:

Optimize Server Consolidations with End-to-End Modeling
Presenter: Tom Thompson, OPNET Technologies, Inc.
Consolidation or relocation of servers can have significant impact on end-user response times and on the network infrastructure. The increased costs of the network may significantly reduce the ROI that was expected. End-users may not experience satisfactory application response times. In this session we will present best-practice methodologies that meet these challenges with critical analysis and current modeling techniques to accurately size the required changes to the enterprise infrastructure - leveraging server configurations and workloads, network configurations and workloads, and network application characteristics. These methodologies can be used to proactively:

• Ensure adequate server capacity
• Ensure adequate network capacity
• Ensure end-to-end application performance
  

By following these methodologies early in the planning cycle, the user can more accurately calculate the costs and risks associated with the consolidation or relocation initiative - before significant expenses are incurred.

A Methodology for Tracking Capital Spending for IT
The processes described in this session illustrate a simple methodology to produce consistent financial reporting of IT capital spending in terms recognized by both customers and non-technical management. The individual work of capacity planners in separate technical areas is periodically combined into a single database from which reports can be generated to provide input to chargeback models, procurement actions, as well as estimates of current and future capital spending by business line and project.

How's Your Memory
Presenter: Claire Cates
Detailed memory analysis of a system, especially a large complex system, can be very beneficial. The analysis may uncover performance issues or misuse of this limited system resource. Obtaining the analysis data though is often difficult. This paper describes how SAS(r) uses RootCause(tm) along with a custom probe to gather data from the SAS System memory management routines. The type of data collected will be described, along with the types of problems that can be uncovered by analyzing this data.

Sponsors:

	OPNET Technologies is a leading provider of management software for networks and applications. OPNET's best-in-class solutions address application and network performance management; capacity planning and design; modeling and simulation; network audit; and configuration management.
	BMC Software enables you to monitor and manage business services, along with the technology infrastructure supporting them—applications, data, systems and networks—simultaneously.