SCMG Meeting Richmond
April 24, 2007

Location:

Agenda:

Speakers:

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 is currently a team lead for IBM Global Services in Richmond.

Bryant Osborn
For the last 12 years, Bryant Osborn has been a full-time capacity planner / performance trouble-shooter 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 using a variety of network, midrange and mainframe modeling tools.

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 140,000 MIPS and 1,200 terabytes of active DASD.

Bryant has previously presented papers at the U.S. CMG, the U.K. CMG, SHARE, and many regional CMGs.  His last Southern CMG presentation (April, 2006) was on building end-to-end performance models using OPNET Mainframe Characterization Editor (MCE).  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.

Thom Wheeler
For the last 11 years, Thom Wheeler has held several positions as a capacity planner / performance trouble-shooter for Bank of America.  He is currently a Senior Analyst working on the Integrated Performance Engineering team.

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 has served as Project Manager of the "Enterprise Wide Capacity and Performance" project of SHARE for more than 10 years. Lin is currently Regional Chair of Southern CMG and Assistant Program Chair for CMG 2007.

Lin has published 17 CMG papers (plus one additional paper for UKCMG 2003) 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:

Security and Compliance Incident Response
Dipto Chakravarty and John Melvin Antony, Novell
This session presents a manifesto for handling incident response related to compliance breach in corporate governance, which is an emerging software infrastructure for managing compliance and security. Public companies are failing to meet compliance because the vital cross-sections of data that is supposed to help companies meet the regulatory criteria are not readily available and what is available is insufficient to meet the regulations. This session, in a 3-part approach, introduces: a set of primitives, the concept of a “unit of work”, and characterizes its incident response workload.

System Management by Exception
Igor A. Trubin, IBM Global Services
Statistical Exception Detection System (SEDS) has been successfully used for more than six years to automatically produce web-based exception reports against SAS/ITRM performance data warehouse for a large, multi-platform environment. Adding some application specific metrics, including middleware traffic and response times, made SEDS an excellent tool for application performance management. This session also describes how to create statistical control charts using a spreadsheet in order to capture a performance issue without using expensive tools such as SAS or BMC.

An Introduction to Modeling zAAP (and zIIP) Processors
Bryant Osborn and Thom Wheeler, Bank of America
Why implement zAAP and zIIP processors? They certainly add another level of complexity to z/OS environments. So, why do this? For licensing costs? For performance improvements? This presentation is an introduction to zAAP and zIIP processors, what to expect, how to generate data, and a demonstration of using IBM's Tivoli Performance Modeler to evaluate zAAP configurations.

The use of zPCR to Plan for Mainframe Specialty Engines (zIIPs and zAAPs)
Linwood Merritt
The zPCR tool is recommended by most mainframe experts for sizing upgrades, particularly when moving to fewer/faster engines. The use of MIPS tables shows a wide range of expected capacity depending on which table is used and how many CPU engines are configured. When specialty engines (zIIPs and zAAPs) are planned, zPCR is the only way to determine capacity impacts to the general purpose engines and expected capacity of the specialty engines. This presentation will lead attendees through a sizing exercise using different MIPS tables and zPCR, and analyze the use of zAAP engines and their potential for reducing the number of general purpose engines in the upgraded configuration.

Sponsors:

Axios Products, Inc., develops, distributes, and supports mainframe performance enhancement and management software for z/OS, OS/390 and MVS environments. Since our establishment in 1976, we have dedicated ourselves to providing customers with useful, reliable, and cost-effective software along with responsive technical support.

For over 38 years Macro 4 has delivered world-class software solutions to a global customer base. During this time, the use of IT has been transformed and it is now clear that the days of having a single platform for each critical business application are long gone. Today's business climate demands a speed of development and deployment that often means having application components built quickly with languages such as Java and then spread across different platforms from Mainframes to Unix to Linux to Windows. This is great - until something goes wrong. This presentation will look at a new generation of solutions specifically designed to help organizations investigate the causes and challenges of application performance problems - covering technologies from mainframes with Cobol and Assembler to Linux, Unix and Windows with Java. Why not come along and find out why  "it pays to be different".