Presentations and Abstracts

So you want to manage your Z-series MIPS?  Then detect & control application workload variance!

Workload analysis on the mainframe can be complicated if your business runs operations 7/24 with hundreds of applications.  At our enterprise, we have a success story where the Z-series MIPS capacity has been held flat for more than two years. Each month every application is measured for current activity and compared to a baseline. Those applications that exceed a variance threshold are detected as out of standard or OOS for short. The OOS applications receive scrutiny to determine a named cause of the variance. This paper provides basic instruction and lessons learned.

Pivot tables/charts -- magic beans without living in a fairy tale

This presentation will show how one analyst uses the pivot table feature of Microsoft EXCEL to arrive at a quick performance analysis. At our enterprise, we use pivot tables and charts as monitoring tools, performance analysis, and management communication.  An explanation of the basic concepts to create and manipulate pivot tables will be combined with a real-time demonstration of the tables and charts. At times in your career you find a tool that is truly worth learning about. This is one of those times and one of those tools!

Review of the Statistical Sizing Approach for Virtualization

MetLife adopted a statistical approach to determine the appropriate configuration for each virtual partition.  The approach guarantees less resources than a partition is expected to use during peak periods and assumes that excess resource needs will be satisfied by the shared resources.  The objective of this methodology is to achieve a target utilization for the total/aggregate physical resource greater than what is normally seen for standalone physical systems.  This presentation reviews the environment after over one year of performance measurements have been collected to determine the effectiveness of this sizing practice and any corrections needed.  Additionally, the presentation opens with a general Virtualization Basics section to provide the common vocabulary used during this review.

Getting Started with Capacity Planning

Centene acknowledged the need to establish an IT Capacity Management department mid-2008.  After hiring a Capacity Planner, the first step in developing a Capacity Management strategy is to determine where you are, where youre going and how youre going to get there.  The objective of the maturity model is to provide the framework for the Capacity Management Strategy.  Once Centene had the framework developed for the strategy, a quarterly capacity report was generated for review and feedback by different areas of IT.  This presentation encompasses the detail of the maturity model and the first capacity report created at Centene, the beginning steps of Capacity Management at Centene.

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Meeting Details

Date: Tuesday February 10^th

Time: 9am to 3:30 pm

Cost: $50 by February 3rd; $60 at the door 

Fee is waived for anyone who is out of work and for Full-time College Students with ID; must RSVP

Location:

MetLife - St Louis Campus

13045 Tesson Ferry Rd, St. Louis, MO 63128

Send payment to

St. Louis Computer Measurement Group

P.O. Box 1474, Maryland Heights, MO  63043

 or

Use PayPal to send your payments to stlcmg@cmg.org  

or

You can now buy multiple Learning Passes at one time to simplify your purchasing!

8:30 9:00                        Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00 9:15                        Welcome and Introductions - Ben Geolat

9:15 10:15                      So you want to manage your Z-series MIPS?  Then detect & control application workload variance!

                                          presented by John Van Wagenen of Caterpillar

10:30 11:30                    Pivot tables/charts -- magic beans without living in a fairy tale

                                           presented by John Van Wagenen of Caterpillar

11:30  1:00                      Lunch

1:00  2:15                        Review of the Statistical Sizing Approach for Virtualization presented by  Chris Althen of MetLifes Enterprise Performance and Capacity Optimization group

2:30  3:30                        Show and Tell presenting Maturity Model and Quarterly Report

                                          presented by  Michelle Barton, Enterprise Capacity Planner at  Centene Corporation

3:30                                   Closing