SCMG Meeting Richmond
April 18, 2006

Location:

Agenda:

Speakers:

Robert Blackburn
Robert is employed by Dominion Resources, formerly Virginia Electric & Power Co (Vepco), in Richmond, Virginia. He has over 30 years of mainframe experience in Systems Programming and Performance & Tuning, and more recently in Capacity Planning. Some recent projects include conversion to WLM goal mode, data center consolidation due to corporate merger, simplification of mainframe cost allocation, consolidation of two mainframes onto a single footprint, and participation in IBM zPCR Controlled Availability Program.

Linwood Merritt
Lin started his data processing career in 1970 as a Simulation Analyst and has been a US CMG member since 1984. He served as a Subject Area Chair for CMG in 2003, Vice Chair of Southern CMG in 2004, Assistant Program Chair for CMG 2004, and Program Chair for CMG 2005. He is currently the Project Manager of the "Enterprise Wide Capacity and Performance" project of SHARE (since 1994), 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 29 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.

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 last year in the IBM z/Series Expo. Igor continues to enhance his exception detection methodologies, and is currently a team lead for IBM Global Services in Richmond.

Bryant Osborn
For the last 11 years, Bryant Osborn has been a full-time capacity planner for Bank of America.  He is currently a Senior Analyst working on the Integrated Performance Engineering team.  The IPE team specializes in cross-platform (end-to-end) capacity and performance issues and projects.

The IPE team has extensive involvement in trouble-shooting and maintaining Bank of America's nationwide banking system, which at its core is built on an IBM z/OS Sysplex data-sharing environment of over 100,000 MIPS and over 550 terabytes of active DASD.

The IPE team investigates the interactions between the network, mid-range, and mainframe environments using both simulation tools such as OPNET’s IT Guru and ACE trace facility, and analytic modeling tools, such as Mainview Predict (a.k.a. BEST/1).

Bryant has previously presented papers at the US CMG, UKCMG, SHARE, and many regional CMGs. His last two national CMG papers were on understanding and planning for Sysplex data-sharing overheads, and understanding and planning for VTAM multinode persistent sessions.

Don Deese
Computer Measurement Group: 1981 Recipient, A. A. Michelson Award, Past-President, General Chairman of 4 International Conferences, CMG Board of Directors for 8 years. Other: Over 35 years experience in computer capacity planning and computer performance evaluation, author of CPExpert - an expert system designed to evaluate performance of MVS environments.

Abstracts:

zPCR User Experiences
Robert Blackburn, Dominion Resources
Linwood Merritt, Bank of America
This session will feature several user experiences gained while participating in the zPCR Controlled Availability program. The users will relate 'lessons learned' as it relates to the roll out and use of zPCR. The speakers will discuss the usability of the tool, including installation experiences. The speakers will also offer hints and tips they have learned using the tool, and discuss how they see using this tool in their installations and what impacts if any zPCR will have on capacity planning processes in their shops.

Capturing Workload Pathology by Statistical Exception Detection System
Igor Trubin, IBM Global Services
This session describes one site's experience of using Multivariate Adaptive Statistical Filtering (MASF) to recognize automatically some common computer system defects such as run-away processes on one or multiple CPUs and memory leaks. Home made SEDS (Statistical Exception Detection System) that captures any global and application level statistical exceptions was modified to recognize, separately report and alarm about those particular defects.
( Paper: Capturing Workload Pathology by Statistical Exception Detection System)

Introduction to zSeries Application Assist Processor (zAAP)

Starting with z/OS V1R6 on z890 and z990 servers, Java applications can run on a new type of processor called the eServer zSeries Application Assist Processor (zAAP). The zAAP is a relatively inexpensive solution for installations running a large amount of Java work. This session presents an overview of zAAP processors, describes how zAAP processors interact with z/OS, discusses some performance considerations when implementing zAAP processors, and describes the data available in RMF that can be used to analyze zAAP performance. This session also describes the zAAP enhancements that are available with IBM's new z9 109 server, and the changes implemented with z/OS V1R7.

Sponsors:

	Metron is a privately owned limited company which was founded in 1986. The company is Europe's foremost capacity planning and systems performance management specialist. Metron's flagship product, Athene, has been sold to over 300 clients and adopted by major IT suppliers. Athene is the leading performance management software package providing measurement, analysis, planning and reporting capabilities for UNIX, Linux, Windows Servers and z/OS mainframe environments.
	CA's Wily Technology Division is the market-leading provider of enterprise application management solutions. Through end-to-end visibility into customer transactions in real time, Wily's products enable organizations to successfully manage the health and availability of their critical Web applications and infrastructure. This means better customer service, more stable revenue streams, and higher IT productivity.