March, 2008
by Tom Kelman
I started off my day on February 12 by going to the local commuter airport and hopping my company's jet to St. Louis. Believe me it's the only way to fly. No long lines and no security hassles. The flight was just under one hour, and once in St. Louis I continued this great day by attending St. Louis CMG's first meeting of 2008. This meeting was very well planned and the agenda was excellent. MetLife provided great facilities for the meeting. Approximately 50 STLCMG members were in attendance.
The St. Louis Regional started back up in October of 2007 after a brief hiatus. When they restarted they decided to have a mixture of well known speakers and local "how to" speakers at their meetings. This is working very well for the group as everyone gets both a theoretical and practical viewpoint of performance tuning and capacity planning.
The first speaker of the day was Chris Althen from MetLife who discussed how MetLife handles enterprise wide performance and capacity optimization. He started by explaining the environment at MetLife, and then he discussed the things they did well. These included their "Comprehensive Application Health Analysis", the capacity request process, capacity review sessions, and setting and monitoring service levels. Chris also explained how MetLife did costing and chargeback. At the end of his talk he went into the challenges that MetLife faced, which are some of the same ones we all face such, as virtualization of system P and VMware servers. He also talked about the challenge of leveraging the off-shore resources available to him and ensuring that they are creating accurate and reliable reports.
The next speaker was Dr. Boris Zibitsker from BEZ Systems. He presented "Enterprise Data Management Optimization". He explained that since data is one of the most important assets of the enterprise the databases that contain it should be monitored and measured. The volume of data is increasing exponentially and how this data is stored and accessed can have a serious impact on performance. The use of modeling and capacity management technologies to predict this growth as the business changes is essential.
After Dr. Zibitsker's presentation, I gave a short talk on CMG'08 and MeasureIT encouraging attendees to consider writing papers for both. We then broke for a delicious lunch of veal parmesan, spaghetti, and salad.
After lunch Wayne Bell of UniGroup, Inc. presented "Beyond the Trend Line - Extending that Line into the Future". This was a great talk for those of us who are lacking in statistical tools. He gave several methods of trending data using basic methods and showed when each method should be considered. Some of these methods are linear percentage growth, monthly compound percentage growth, and annual percentage growth. He also explained linear regression and exponential regression. He gave some simple formulas that can be used by anyone to trend their data.
The last speaker of the day was Jonathan McCormick from VMware, Inc. He presented an overview of VMware. He explained how VMware works and what's new in the 3rd generation and in VMware ESX. He also discussed the VMware Performance Monitor and the VMware Capacity Planner.
The next meeting of St. Louis CMG will be on Tuesday, May 13. If you are in the St. Louis area I would recommend you attend one of their meetings. You'll come away with valuable information and meet some of your great colleagues.