May, 2008
by Carl Kyonka and Anthony Mungal
CMG Canada held its annual two day spring Conference in the heart of Toronto at C'est What Restaurant capping off its twenty third (2007/2008) year of operation. The C'est What facility is a well known establishment, and even though the facilities were somewhat compact, it has proven effective for our purposes. We are grateful for the sponsorship of this event, in part, by CA, Inc. Our first day emphasized mainframe topics, the second day was more open-ended. Overall, judging from the evaluations, the attendees were pleased with the speakers, the sessions, the social networking and interactions, and of course, the exclusivity of the famed, on-premises micro brew.
Tom Russell and Gord Neill of IBM Canada teamed up to give two presentations on new features of the Z10 (pronounced Zed Ten) systems. Tom focussed on the processor and described some of the new complexities in memory aimed at improving performance. Gord spoke about new capacity management features including DASD changes. These two presentations covered a dense array of topics about these new systems and there was much interest in these presentations.
Reg Harbeck of CA spoke about Regulatory Compliance and the IBM Mainframe. He described some of the environmental expectations of a mainframe installation, including security concerns, and discussed some of the resulting architectural implications.
Kevin Martin, our webmaster, of McKesson Inc., a health care service provider, presented "Adjusting RMPTTOM to Reduce SRM Overhead", a technical description of a problem on a heavily loaded system and one tactic to reclaim some processing power. Part of Kevin's discussion included a description of leveraging a solution from www.MXG.com.
Tony Mungal from EMC presented "On the Importance of I/O Parallelism and I/O Priority structures in z/OS Environments". Tony discussed the performance aspects of very large disks and implications for the future. He described challenges of funneling many I/O requests to the same actuator and subsystem, and the need for higher degrees of parallelism.
Our second day began with Mario Jauvin of MFJ Associates who spoke on "Seeing it All at Once with Barry". No, it is not that Barry! One part of this novel visualization technique is to plot data within a triangle, where the three plotted metrics sum to a constant. This method allows many objects to be plotted in an amazingly concise fashion.
Denise Kalm of CA presented "THE MINIMUM DAILY ADULT", a counterpoint to commonly held beliefs about presenting statistical information. Denise punctuated her message with pertinent quotes about how to misrepresent (or not) statistics. She particularily emphasized that averages are not enough to represent a situation.
Scott Wardley from the Royal Bank of Canada, spoke about "Solaris Virtualization". He described a real world implementation of this technology in a large installation. He also presented some tactics they developed deploying new virtualized instances.
Kellman Meghu of Checkpoint spoke on "Open Performance Security Architecture Past and Future". This presentation included some measures of firewall performance and caution against using simplistic benchmarks.
Our finale was provided by Don Melton, our Membership Director, of Vatic Technologies, a consulting firm. This was "Don's Diatribe VII", his seventh iteration of a series of informed opinions about current kudos and cautions regarding operating systems, networks, web technologies.
CMG Canada enters into its twenty fourth year of operation in September 2008 with its 2008/2009 season and those specific dates (for 4 Seminar/Conference days - usually October, February, and mid-April) will be published to http://regions.cmg.org/regions/cacmg within the coming weeks. We are actively soliciting speakers and papers for this upcoming year, and would love to hear from you. The membership details, past agendas and presentations, and contact information are also available on that web site.