May, 2008
by Dave Thorn
A rainy Friday in Philly greeted attendees at the May 16 PHILACMG meeting. It didn't dampen anyone's spirits though. Most of those registered managed to make it to another informative day at the Holiday Inn right in the heart of Philadelphia's historic district.
Phil Logsdon of PerfCap, our Featured Vendor, started off with an overview of PerfCap's PAWZ product. PAWZ is a tool for monitoring performance and predicting capacity of distributed systems, including HP-UX, AIX, Linux, Solaris, Tru64, Windows and OpenVMS. It features simple installation & navigation and fully automated reports and notifications, maximizing functionality while minimizing daily supervision requirements.
Next, Dr. Prem Sinha, PerfCap's founder, presented "Capacity Planning Using Headroom Analysis." His presentation focused on issues encountered in enterprise capacity planning with large numbers of decentralized heterogeneous servers. He discussed a methodology that defines and uses "Remaining Headroom" as a composite metric for capacity projections and how Remaining Headroom can be used as a KPI (Key Performance Index) to automate and manage capacity risk management.
After the break, Bill Yeager of Alebra Technologies presented "The Hidden Cost of TCP/IP on z/OS." Bill explained that most enterprises use communication networks (TCP/IP) to exchange data between homogenous and heterogeneous systems. He contrasted the performance and processor impacts on z/OS with the use of TCP/IP for high speed data transfer, provided empirical data and a measurement methodology, and described alternative mechanisms to dramatically reduce processing while increasing performance for high volume data movement.
PHILACMG officer Ivan Gelb was scheduled as the afternoon speaker; his presentation was titled "IBM z10 News and Views." Unfortunately he was stuck somewhere in our beloved airline system and was unable to attend. Fortunately Mark Vitale, another Philly CMG officer, came to the rescue with "Understanding AIX Virtualization in a PowerVM Partition." This was an updated version of a presentation given last year by Mark's colleague at The Information Systems Manager, Pete Weilnau. Mark gave an overview of PowerVM, explaining that it was modeled after zSeries partitioning, and provided a detailed look at instrumentation. He showed examples of the benefits of PowerVM and listed some best practices as well.
After that, it was back into the rain, but we all were just a little smarter than we were in the morning!