May, 2008
by Tim Follen
OHVCMG held its spring meeting on April 24, 2008 at Dave and Busters in Columbus Ohio. The meeting and lunch were sponsored by EMC. The day started off right with a buffet breakfast at 8:00 am. We had excellent speakers including a Mullen award winner as well as one of our own board members.
To begin, Rick Ralston from Humana gave a very informative presentation titled Using SAS/Graph to Display Performance and Capacity Data. Rick showed us a few useful tips and information for developing graphs using SAS/Graph. He also demonstrated "heat charts" to display performance and capacity data in an interesting and usable manner. Heat charts provide the ability to visualize 3 dimensional data in 2 dimensions. The techniques used are platform independent, although the work was done on the z/OS platform.
Following Rick was our very own board member Doug Lane from EMC Corporation. Doug's topic was: EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 Technical Briefing. Doug gave us a technical briefing on the EMC Symmetrix DMX4, the latest edition of their flagship storage platform. The briefing included information regarding the new SSD (Solid State Drives) Flash Drives for "Tier 0" applications, Virtual Provisioning (enhanced thin provisioning), 1TB SATA drives and dynamic cache provisioning as supported in the latest releases of the microcode 5772 and 5773. Doug explained how all of these new technical features of the latest release of the microcode would help storage management and capacity planning professionals to better utilize their resources and understand the workload, model and tune the environment, and be prepared for future storage and performance challenges. Doug gave an illustration of the importance for IT professionals in understanding business processes and applications supported by the IT infrastructure and how that understanding could mean the difference between a great product launch or a publicity fiasco.
Then Brad Steckline from our lunch sponsor, EMC Corporation, briefed the attendees on the importance of new approaches to meet the challenges of managing the ever increasing volumes of information for Backup, Recovery and Archiving. The discussion covered hardware and software, as well as other issues affecting data availability and safeguarding. Regulatory compliance, e-discovery, and internal business policy decisions regarding retention were also touched upon. Tape and disk based backup, de-duplication and remote replication technologies for recovery and archiving were also discussed.
Right after lunch Michael Salsburg, Ph.D. kept us alert with his presentation: Beyond the Hypervisor Hype. This paper won the Mullen award for 2007. Michael provided a simple model of today's hypervisors. He then discussed a set of benchmarks that have been published by VMware and XenSource and went on to discuss the performance implications of the benchmark results. Michael also discussed the impact of server virtualization on the role of capacity planning. One of the core messages in his presentation was the importance of understanding what business applications and processes were supported by the IT infrastructure and understanding how that changing load can affect performance and throughput of the supporting systems.
The final topic of the day was presented by Montgomery Bauman & John Balis of IBM. They gave us a z10 update Latest z10 platform announcement - Technical Briefing. On February 26, 2008 IBM announced the IBM System z10 Enterprise Class Server (Z10 EC). The z10 EC provides 50% more performance for most workloads and up to 100% more performance for compute intensive jobs than the z9. Monte and John gave a very insightful and interactive presentation on the z10.
As always, Dave & Busters provided an excellent facility for our meeting including plenty of food. The meeting adjourned around 4:00 and everyone was given drink coupons as well as gift cards for Dave & Busters to use during the well-attended PARS session which lasted until about 5:00 PM.
| Chair | Dr. Steve Guendert | |
| Vice Chair | Dan Ruehl | |
| Secretary/Treasurer | Kathy Steffens | |
| Director | Neil Carron | |
| Director | Jerry Valentine | |
| Director | Tim Follen | |
| Director | Doug Lane |