SCMG Meeting Richmond
October 23, 2008

Location:

Agenda:

Speakers:

Emmanuel Sauvion
Emmanuel Sauvion is Technical Director of North American Operations for Sysload Software. He has worked with Sysload in the Performance Management arena for more than six years and recently moved to the Boston area to help launch the Sysload North American Operation. Prior to Sysload, Emmanuel worked as a Consultant in Research & Development for Dassault Data Services. He is a graduate of ESIEA, School of Engineering ( Paris , France ).

Igor Trubin
Igor started his career in 1979 as an IBM 360/370 system engineer. In 1986 he got his Ph.D. in Robotics at St. Petersburg Technical University ( Russia ) and then worked as a professor teaching CAD/CAM, Robotics and Computer Science for about 12 years at the same University. Igor has published about 30 papers and made several presentations for different international conferences related to the Robotics, Artificial Intelligent and Computer fields. In 1999 he moved to the US and worked at Capital One Services, Inc. in Richmond as a Capacity Planner. His first CMG paper was written and presented by him in 2001 in Reno , NV . The next one, "Global and Application Level Exception Detection System Based on MASF Technique," won a Best Paper award at US CMG 2002 and was presented again at UKCMG 2003 in Oxford , England . His CMG 2004 paper about applying MASF technique to mainframe performance management was republished in the IBM z/Series Expo. Igor continues to enhance his exception detection methodologies, and currently works at SunTrust in Richmond, Virginia.

John Yennie
John has worked in the field of Information Technology for 30 years. After 20 years of developing applications on distributed systems, including many years of writing software instrumentation at Hewlett Packard, he began working in the performance engineering and capacity planning field. He is currently working at US Customs and Border Protection as a Distributed Systems Capacity Planner.

Kathy Walsh
Kathy is an internationally recognized technical leader in the System z platform, covering both hardware and software, with a focus on systems management.  Named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2002, Kathy provides technical and project leadership on the use, deployment and benefits of  System z technology. She has extensive experience consulting with clients on the performance and management of their z/OS environments, often in support of customer critical situations.  Areas of focus include support for System z processors, LPAR configuration and management, Parallel Sysplex performance, z/OS Workload Manager, RMF, Batch Window issues, and System z capacity planning with a focus on the IBM zPCR tool.

Jim McGalliard
Jim has been a project manager at GSA’s Federal Systems Integration and Management Center , FEDSIM, since 1986, and has managed projects for about 40 U.S. Government agencies during that time.  He is the author of two books on U.S. Government information technology contracting and performance evaluation, plus many papers and articles; has spoken at many conferences in the U.S. and internationally; and has been called as an expert witness in legal disputes in this area.  Jim is certified as a Project Management Professional by PMI, the Project Management Institute, and earned an MBA at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Linwood Merritt
Lin started his data processing career in 1970 as a Simulation Analyst and has been a US CMG member since 1984. He has served as Subject Area Chair, Assistant Program Chair and Program Chair for CMG and served as Project Manager of the "Enterprise Wide Capacity and Performance" project of SHARE for 11 years. Lin is currently Regional Chair of Southern CMG and a Subject Area Chair for CMG 2008.

Lin has published 19 CMG papers and presented at 30 SHARE conferences. He won the CMG 1997 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:

Performance Management In The VMware World
Emmanuel Sauvion, Sysload Software 
Virtualization and VMware are hot topics today but both come with challenges. In this presentation, we will focus on performance in Virtual environments and especially on VMware.
• How to manage the hosts from a performance perspective ?
• Why we cannot forget the guest machines.
• What to manage and how?
During this presentation we will answer these questions along with the ultimate question: how to keep users happy while saving money in our optimized VMware world?

Exception Based Modeling and Forecasting
Igor Trubin, SunTrust Banks, Inc.
How often does the need arise for modeling and forecasting? Should it be done manually by ad-hoc, by project requests or automatically? What tools and techniques are best for that? When is a trending forecast enough and when is a correlation with business drivers required? The answers to these questions are presented in this paper. The capacity management system should automatically provide a small list of resources that need to be modeled or forecasted; a simple spreadsheet tool can be used for that. This method is already implemented on the author's environment with thousands of servers. (Presentation)

Application Response Measurement from Development to Test to Production
John Yennie, US Customs and Border Protection
This presentation describes the processes and procedures of getting applications developed with Application Response Measurement (ARM) instrumentation and then moving the ARM solution from the development environment to the QA or test environment and finally into production. We also examine the pros and cons of vendor offerings for the agent and management functions. We also investigate new technology that makes it easier to prototype and test ARM solutions.

Data De-Duplication of Backups for UNIX, Linux, Windows, and VMware Servers
Roger Schnurman, Technical Business Consultant, BackUp Recovery and Archive, EMC
Data De-Duplication of backups for UNIX, Linux, Windows, and VMware servers is a hot topic for today's backup teams. With the significant reduction of backup data, the ability to retain backups for much longer and the ability to move backups off-site without physical tape over lower capacity WANs can have a dramatic effect on an organizations costs for data retention and recovery. EMC will discuss approaches to Data De-Duplication and some methods and tools to estimate the effectiveness of these technologies with your data.

z/OS Hot Topics
Kathy Walsh, IBM
This fast paced, always new presentation will cover the latest information on recent System z10 and z/OS performance and capacity planning issues. Recent performance enhancements, gotchas, and recommendations will be reviewed. Also covered will be the latest information relating to recent performance APARs and WSC performance offerings.  Information on Specialty CPs will also be covered.

 A Benchmark Comparison of Dual- and Quad-Core Processor Linux Clusters with Two Global Climate Modeling Workloads
Jim McGalliard, FEDSIM
The NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center provides high performance highly parallel processors, mass storage, and supporting infrastructure to a community of computational Earth and space scientists.  Long running (days) and highly parallel (hundreds of CPUs) jobs are common in the workload.  NCCS management structures batch queues and allocates resources to optimize system use and prioritize workloads.  NCCS technical staff uses a locally developed discrete event simulation tool to model the impacts of evolving workloads, potential system upgrades, alternative queue structures and resource allocation policies. (Presentation)

Using Business Growth Information in Capacity Planning Forecasts
Lin Merritt, Bank of America
The identification of business driver information is an early step in its use for capacity planning. The information may be in the form of business metrics and affected IT resources or a compilation of growth rates. This paper discusses techniques for the combination of trending forecast techniques with business information, issues around the identification and use of business growth information, and approaches to integrate business forecasting with capacity forecasting. (Presentation)

Sponsors:

Sysload Software, a privately held corporation founded in 1999, is a world leader in systems measurement, and performance management solutions for servers.  Sysload provides solutions to manage both physical and virtual environments on all types of servers found within today's corporate environment (VMware, Windows, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, Linux, Citrix, i-series, etc.).  Sysload’s unique technology allows companies to maximize the use of existing infrastructure, optimize new server investments and reduce IT management costs.  The company has joint headquarters in Paris, France and Boston, Massachusetts, as well as offices in the UK.

EMC stores, protects, optimizes, and leverages information with the aim of contributing to their clients' success.