SCMG Meeting Raleigh
October 27, 2006

Location:

Agenda:

Speakers:

Russell Rogers
Russell Rogers is Vice President and Technical Manager for the Distributed Systems Capacity and Performance Management Group, responsible for server capacity planning for the Global Trade, Wealth Management, and the Service Fulfillment Organization at Bank of America. With over 10,000 servers driving time critical applications, Russ’ role is to insure these systems have sufficient capacity to meet application demand, while also having the fiduciary responsibility to insure the bank spends its money wisely. Developing scaleable strategies for managing capacity across large diverse networks of distributed systems and developing methods for better technology cost analysis and chargeback are two major areas of focus for Russ and his team. He plans to give this paper at the 32nd Annual Conference of the International CMG at Reno, Nevada, in December 2006.

Chris Molloy
Chris is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM working in the outsourcing area. With over 65,000 people supporting outsourcing worldwide for IBM, Chris' role is to inject innovation and new technology into the accounts in order to provide them a competitive advantage. Chris focuses on improving system management solutions for his customers. He is a frequent speaker at CMG, and holds a patent for some of his work in performance management and capacity planning. The paper he is presenting today was selected as one of the two best papers of CMG 2005.

Martha Hays
Martha Hays is a Technical Training Specialist with SAS Institute, concentrating on the development and teaching of IT Management Solutions. Her responsibilities during the last seven years with SAS have been in the sales support, consulting and business development of the IT products, as well as the training. Martha has over 30 years experience in IT performance and capacity management with IBM, with twelve years' experience in network design, performance and capacity planning consulting with IBM Global Services. With expertise in data network design, performance, and capacity planning modeling; she achieved certification as a Consulting I/T Specialist in 1994.

Curtis Hrischuk
Curtis Hrischuk has been a performance engineer for 15+ years, also functioning as a software engineer/architect as well. He is currently the Lead Performance Engineer for several mobile enterprise IBM products: mobile VPN product for PDA / cell phone / laptop / desktop, Personal Information Manager (PIM) synchronization, MQ and DB2 for mobile devices, a portal designed for mobile devices, and a J2EE framework for mobile devices. His responsibilities involve performance requirements, measurements, analysis, and capacity sizing processes. He has received his M.Eng. (1995) and Ph.D. (1998) in performance area from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Linwood Merritt
Linwood Merritt started his data processing career in 1970 as a Simulation Analyst and has been a US CMG member since 1984. He is the Project Manager of the "Enterprise Wide Capacity and Performance" project of SHARE, Regional Chair of Southern CMG, and Assistant Program Chair for CMG 2006.

Lin has published 17 CMG papers (plus one additional paper for UKCMG 2003) and presented at 30 SHARE conferences. He won the CMG97 Mullen award for the presentation "Performance Data from the Server to the Intranet: Getting the Data and Reporting It," and presented it at UKCMG in 1998. He is now working as a mainframe Capacity Planner at Bank of America in Richmond, Virginia.

Abstracts:

A Technology Cost Model for Server Infrastructure Management
Russell Rogers, Bank of America
Today, the method used most often for budgeting server growth is linear gross estimation. The method is simple - a manager applies the percentage increase in business growth to the total number of severs they currently have in production. However this method can create significant distortions. This paper reviews an approach to defining a technology cost model using principals from Activity Based Costing. The model is designed to give managers the data they need to make better decisions regarding server budgets.

The Future of Performance Management and Capacity Planning
Chris Molloy, IBM
Providing performance and capacity management (PCM) service is an integration of people, process, and products. The purpose of this paper is to explore each of these areas with respect to future industry direction. We will discuss the labor strategy of PCM, a combination of on site, off site, near shore and off shore resources. We will discuss IT process models and their implications on PCM. We will discuss how the new product technology is affecting the PCM space. The session will conclude with recommendations on how PCM personnel should proceed, in response.

Software Performance Lifecycle Case Study at a Large National Bank
Amit Patel
Performance problems in production, end user complaints, customer frustrations, sound familiar? Hear about the experiences, lessons learned, and challenges from integrating performance testing at a large national bank after the release of a CRM application into production. Also, learn how custom monitoring, regression analysis, and daily production reports played an important role in identifying issues in production. This presentation illustrates and examines the challenges of performance planning, testing, analysis, and optimization after the release of a CRM application.

Bringing ITIL® to Life: Automating IT Capacity Management
Martha Hays, SAS Institute
The ever growing complexity and increasing size of current IT infrastructures are the top challenges for today’s IT Capacity Managers. Facing hundreds of servers supporting vital business functions makes Capacity Management automation a must. This paper outlines how to overcome the challenges of modern large scale environments by implementing an ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) compliant best-practice Capacity Management methodology based on advanced analytics and business.

A Tutorial on SIP Application Server Performance and Benchmarking
Curtis Hrischuk, IBM
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an internet protocol for establishing sessions between two or more parties. It is becoming ubiquitous in uses ranging from Voice over IP, instant messaging, Internet TV, and others. The Java community has even provided a standardized API so that SIP applications can now be built within J2EE application servers. These new capabilities also bring with them new performance engineering methods, tools, and benchmarking needs. This paper describes the experiences and processes for the performance engineering of SIP applications in a J2EE environment.

"Mainframe MIPS" Open Discussion - Observations Concerning the MP Effect
Led by Lin Merritt, Bank of America
Recent mainframe benchmarks at a user site have unearthed a "MIPS rating" issue: the "MP Effect" (less capacity per CPU engine when there are more engines processing the work) is influenced by the number of CPUs actually busy during the measured interval. This discussion will include the use of IBM's zPCR tool and published mainframe capacity ratings. Although the presentation material is oriented to mainframe capacity ratings, this topic (and discussion) is equally relevant for all platforms. Join this discussion in the continuing saga of CPU normalization.

Sponsors:

Mainstar is committed to solving z/OS infrastructure and data management challenges. They specialize in Business Resiliency and Compliance, Catalog Management, Data Management, DFSMShsm, and General Storage Management.