August, 2007
by Ken Williams
UKCMG was held during a very wet rainy June, with severe flooding occurring in the North of England. However the conference was not affected, and about 250 people gathered in a hotel within sight and sound of the motor racing circuit at Silverstone (just two weeks before the British Grand Prix!) to hear what is new in the world of Computer Performance and Capacity. The theme was yesterday's experience - today's challenge - tomorrow's solutions, all going round in a never ending circle. And the delegates were keen to share their recent experiences to help each other solve today's challenges, especially in the informal evening sessions.
With five concurrent tracks, 70 one hour sessions and four three hour sessions were crammed into three days. One emphasis was on back to basics, so there were a number of introductory sessions, including Adam Grummitt's (Metron) three hour introduction to capacity planning, mixed with the more advanced sessions. The conference concluded with three well attended three hour workshops, including excellent sessions from Glen Anderson (IBM) on WLM, Paul Seaton Smith (Capacitas) on Virtualisation and Adrian Johnson (HyPerformix) on Performance Engineering. One hot topic was the Virtualisation stream, which ran for two full days. A very well attended double session was that from Richard Talaber (VMWare) which gave excellent practical advice on what needs to be considered from a monitoring, analysis and reporting perspective in the virtualised world. Andy Bolton (Capacitas) presented on Application Virtualisation, which provided an excellent overview of the Microsoft Softgrid product, highlighting the potential benefits, pitfalls uses and considerations that the introduction of this technology could have. The stream was started with an enlightening presentation from Chris Molloy (IBM) showing that virtualization should not hold any fears to old mainframe capacity planners but those from the distributed world will have to think about workloads in a new way.
The Mainframe stream was dominated by three sessions from Martin Packer (IBM), where he talked about the new features of CPU, Storage and DB2 respectively; Glenn Anderson told us all about Websphere V6, and there were some great user papers from Steve Brodie (BT), where he told us how to save money by consolidating data centres (Note - don't let your storage expert go to foreign climes and pick up an infection in the middle of a critical move like this) and from Tony Ruberry (John Lewis), on how to communicate with management on the results of performance and capacity measurements.
One of the highlights was a live link to Melbourne, Australia, where Geoff Adams (National Australia Bank) told us how he had saved hundreds of MIPS by adjusting a little known system parameter called RMPTTOM,- pronounced by him Rump-ti-tum!!!
Colin Butcher (XDelta) on Principles of Availability, offered an alternative view on the subject of availability, but raised much good food for thought with regard to capacity, performance, system and architecture design.
Bob Torz (Team Quest) presented on SOA effects on capacity management, gave a pragmatic approach on the potential impact of SOA on the capacity management process.
In the Service Management stream Rob Young (FoxIT) gave an excellent and concise (as much as possible) overview of ITIL version 3 and its potential impact on capacity management. Steve Lawless (Purple Griffon) also gave an excellent alternative view of ITIL V3.
The best paper prize was awarded to Malcolm Gunn (Barclays Bank), for his excellent paper entitled Underneath the Spin - a look at Service Levels. He showed us how easy it is to give management incorrect or misleading information about availability levels for end users, and an approach to get the information correct and useful.
There were a number of user presentations, always a high part of the conference, where users explain how when confronted with a problem they go about solving it in a real life situation, with talks from Tony Ruberry (John Lewis) on how to present capacity planning results to management , and several papers from Friends Provident.
Other notable speakers who gave excellent presentations were Chris Molloy (IBM), Adrian Johnson (Hyperformix), Rich Fronheiser (Metron), Frank Bereznay (Kaiser Permanente) and Des Atkinson (Metron).
No comment will be made about the American speaker who turned up at the airport with an out of date passport, and therefore had to do his presentations remotely by phone. However the USA was well represented by Mullen award winners Peter Johnson (Unisys) and Frank Bereznay (Kaiser Permanente), together with Chris Molloy (IBM), Glen Anderson (IBM), Jaqui Lynch (Circle 4) , and William Miller (CPT Global - American, although he now resides in Frankfurt).
As the conference was within a mile of the Silverstone race track, many vendors had themed presentations on car racing, and the evenings entertainment consisted of one night of virtual horse racing, and one night of Scalectric car racing. Just the sort of themes to help you relax and discuss your performance and capacity problems with your peers.
UKCMG is also planning several master classes for later in the year, plus a one day conference in November. CMG is alive and well in Europe, following successful conferences in Milan, Italy and Nuremberg, Germany, and is looking forward to further conferences next year. So if you'd like to prepare a presentation to be given next year in Europe, please let the European CMG offices know!