May 18, 2010 Agenda

8:30 9:00         Registration, Continental Breakfast, and Networking

9:00 9:15         Welcome and Introductions Ben Geolat

11:30  12:45     Lunch sponsored by Solution Labs

12:45 1:45       Economic Challenges and Capacity Management: Increasing Value and ROI from Capacity Management - a Maturity Model

                           Presented by David Wagner of Solution Labs

1:45 2:15         Overview of Performance Surveyor

                           Presented by David Wagner of Solution Labs

2:30  3:30         Green Capacity Planning: Theory and Practice

                           Presented by Mark Preston of RSPerformance

3:30                    Closing Remarks

Presentation Abstracts

Leveraging the Cloud for Green IT: Predicting the Energy, Cost and Performance of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is maturing, becoming a viable alternative to classic on-premise IT. Cloud facilitates scalability, promising lower fixed and variable costs while supporting enterprise growth. The scalability benefits and cost savings can be achieved through on-demand infrastructure provisioning and reduced on-premise energy consumption. The benefits are compelling; however, a quantitative analysis is required. This paper describes and demonstrates a methodology for predicting performance, energy and cost for expanding on-premise IT into the Cloud.

Best Practices in Batch Tuning -  Empowering IT Staff to Reduce CPU and Run-Time in the Enterprise

This session will explore the key factors that often limit the focus of batch tuning, and discuss the technology framework and methods that effectively assist performance and capacity staff as well as empower other key staff members in the identification and resolution of batch tuning opportunities.

Guidelines for Better Performance Testing

Performance testing forms a fundamental part of any organizations software development lifecycle. Understanding large and complex application systems and then running end to end performance tests is of utmost importance, in order to avoid issues in production. Software systems are almost never perfect, but trying to avoid most of the basic issues/bugs before the application is deployed in production is a good practice. Running a test after choosing any one of the multitudes of free test tools available on the Internet or licensed tools is only a small part of the process. Even before you begin writing test scripts it is essential to understand the workload mix, the data flow, the components that make up the end to end system and the infrastructure available for testing. It is also necessary to assess the risks involved and come up with a mitigation plan. Once tests have been run and data collected it is also extremely vital to properly analyze data and present it, so that all stakeholders involved get a clear picture of the results. This paper will list out steps and guidelines that could be followed to successfully run performance tests. It will explain the criteria for creating good test plans, executing tests, analyzing the raw data and then presenting them in a manner that would be beneficial in understanding what and where if any, bottlenecks lie in the application. The paper will also present ways and tools that could be employed to capture data during tests and how raw data could be analyzed and visually depicted to make it clear to the stakeholders viewing the test results.

The Plethora of z/OS Data available for Capacity Planning

This presentation will provide the audience with a method of tracking system usage and forecasting those systems using a hierarchical approach.  This approach will maintain the granularity required for the vast number of workloads on the complex without overwhelming the planner or the planners audience.

Economic Challenges and Capacity Management: Increasing Value and ROI from Capacity Management - a Maturity Model

During times of economic stress, pressures on IT can become seemingly insurmountable.

Requirements to "ensure business services" and "optimize availability" - challenging enough

when budgets were more open, become extremely challenging. Spending freezes or significant reductions in capital infrastructure, are common. However, just because your hardware or software acquisition budgets have been shrunk or frozen, doesn't mean the requirement to ensure business service uptime, availability and performance lessens.

These challenges make your ability to business justify Capacity Management more critical than ever. Whether you have formalized processes - and the tools to accompany them, or you simply recognize the need to "get started" with Capacity Management, it is critical that you be able to optimize the delivery of Capacity Management within your organization. To do this you need to know where you currently stand in the maturity of your processes and deliverables. You need to elevate your process maturity. You need to optimize the value you deliver. You need to leverage existing staff resources. You need to expand your organizational scope and reach.

Finally, and most critically, you can't get started unless you are able to justify the benefits of

optimized Capacity Management to the broader organization.

This whitepaper is intended to assist you in understanding the key dimensions to Capacity

Management as they affect the business and as they are affected by technical choices and

tradeoffs. This paper suggests a framework by which to conceptualize the business value and

return on investment in Capacity Management.

Green Capacity Planning: Theory and Practice

Green Capacity Planning is a holistic planning approach for todays data centers that incorporates environmental considerations into traditional computer and network capacity planning. This paper presents the methodology, terminology, and practical application of the approach with a case study that evaluates the capacity, storage, and energy footprint of an existing eCommerce system.  The case study quantifies the use of virtualization to reduce energy consumption as the system is scaled to meet the demands of a growing business.

Speaker Biographies

Wayne Bell of Unigroup

Wayne Bell has been in Capacity Planning since 1981.  At his current position at UniGroup, Inc., he is responsible for the capacity and performance of an IBM z/10 complex.  His expertise is in SMF, RMF, Workload Manager (WLM), and MXG Software from Merrill Consultants.

Sal Del Conte of Software Engineering of America

Sal Del Conte is the Global Director of Professional Services and Support for Software Engineering of America. Prior to joining SEA, Sal was the global Vice President of professional services for Diversified Software, and, earlier, managed a professional services firm where he was engaged as a consultant for many of the top 200 firms. Sal has over 35 years of experience in data center standardization and optimization, concentrating in the area of operations effectiveness. 

Mr. Del Conte holds Graduate and Undergraduate degrees in Systems Engineering and Computer Science. He is a published author and a frequent lecturer on the topics of Batch Optimization, Operations Effectiveness and Data Center Standardization.

Tuli Nivas of Sabre Holdings

Tuli Nivas is the Lead Software Performance Engineer at Sabre Holdings, Southlake Texas. Tuli has worked on several of Sabres airline projects including JetBlue, Westjet, Deccan and Kingfisher including products that are part of Sabres of airline solutions. Her main focus is on investigating performance related bottlenecks in products using various platforms and operating systems. She also leads efforts on performance benchmarking new technologies before they are adopted by Sabre. She has been instrumental in designing a Java performance measurement framework that is currently being used by application teams at Sabre. Tuli has a companywide class coming out next month that would educate teams on the importance of proactive performance engineering and its best practices. She is also a regular CMG contributor having published papers every year since 2007.

Tuli is a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research focus is on sensor and delay tolerant networks and their optimization. She is working on a new game theory based congestion control protocol that could be used to maximize the networks lifetime.

Tuli has many varied interests. She is an avid sports fan and plays tennis and racquet ball. She enjoys outdoor activities like whitewater rafting and rock climbing along with knife and sword fighting. She loves music and travel. 

Mark Preston of RSPerformance

Mark Preston has 20+ years of experience in IT related technology, ranging from custom processor level, embedded solutions, industry leading high-performance serial I/O technologies, server and storage systems and business intelligence applications. He has worked with all major OEMs in both Information Technology and Defense Systems, directly managing and implementing planning, analysis and engineering of solutions. This has formed the basis for corporate roles in technology and business development, as well as strategic planning and marketing.

David Wagner of Solution Labs

At Solution Labs, David Wagner is extending his career-long dream of making technology as efficient as possible by helping customers optimize their performance and capacity. Dave uses his over 30 years of technology experience and background in performance analysis and optimization to lead Solution Labs Sales and Marketing efforts, and is responsible for growing a worldwide base of successful and satisfied customers.

In his 11 years at BMC Software, Dave ran Solutions Marketing for areas including Data Center Automation (now Service Automation) and BMC Virtualization Solutions, delivering thought leadership via articles, interviews and a blog on capacity and virtualization. Dave ran Product Management and Marketing for the BMC Performance Assurance product line responsible for growing the distributed solutions from $2M/year in sales in 1996, to an installed base representing over $500M in 2005, with over 1500 customers worldwide.

Previous experience included leading Data General Enterprise Management efforts, responsible for ideation and delivery of the first graphical PC-based management console for Unix Servers and RAID storage arrays (progenitor to today's EMC NaviSphere solution). Earlier, at Stratus Computer, he was a founding member and Secretary of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) an industry standards organization dedicated to quantifying performance efficiency. In the early 1980s, Dave spent 7 years at Digital Equipment Corporation, where in addition to be an OS Engineer, he created and delivered a series of advanced performance analysis and optimization courses to Digitals largest customers.