September, 2007
by Dave Thorn
The latest Philadelphia CMG meeting was held on Friday, September 14. Stephen Guendert of Brocade led off the program with To CUP, or Not To CUP? That is the (FICON) Question!. Steve made the case for "CUP" from a performance management perspective despite what many vendors say. The FICON Director Activity Report, from the RMF type 74(7) records provides the performance metrics.
Next, CMG President and PHILACMG Officer Ivan Gelb took a few minutes to explain what's coming at CMG'07 in San Diego, including some exciting new additions to the conference.
The day's Featured Vendor was Macro 4, represented by Morrie Meyer and Patti Bowman. After the vendor presentation and a break, Morrie continued by presenting Application Performance Tuning: What's Happening Under The Hood?. Morrie explained how systems receive most of the attention when it comes to tuning and performance, but pointed out that system performance is also dependent on the applications it's running. Morrie's session looked at tuning and performance from the application perspective instead.
After lunch, John Baker of Intellimagic presented New Metrics and Methods for New I/O Bottlenecks. He discussed I/O performance from three perspectives: first, how architectural changes have shifted some bottlenecks to the disk subsystem and how some rules of thumb no longer apply; next, an overview of performance insight for both mainframe and open storage; and finally, how to view the future of disk performance, including various configurations.
The final speaker was PHILACMG officer Mark Vitale of The Information Systems Manager. His presentation was simply titled AIX Virtualization. He discussed virtualization on IBM System p (POWER) servers for AIX and Linux guests, including an overview of current technologies used in System p virtualization. He also covered performance tips, best practices and used examples from his own research.
Despite a messy hallway due to hotel renovations the meeting was a success, and everyone is looking forward to the Philly CMG T-shirt meeting in November!