August, 2008
by Frank Bereznay
The Southern California CMG held its summer meeting at the SAS facility in Irvine on August 8. We are very fortunate to have sponsors like SAS that support our region.
We had an abbreviated summer meeting with two morning speakers, Rick Ralston and Frank Bereznay. Rick presented his CMG paper on creating heat charts with SAS Graph. This presentation contained a wealth of information for anybody who is using SAS Graph. Rick really had to push the product to its limits to create the heat chart he wanted, so there was a great explanation about how SAS Graph options work along with some very creative graphing techniques. In addition, there was a discussion about how to use colors that is valuable to anybody who wants to present information visually and has a color capable device. Rick's paper and presentation is a must for anybody who has reporting responsibilities. Frank's presentation shared his experiences in developing a forecasting model to predict the utilization levels of a UPS system in a power constrained data center. There were many lessons to be learned, and Frank shared the mistakes along with the successes. The most valuable part of Frank's presentation was a table of power usage factors for common infrastructure items. Forecasting power usage is fairly straightforward, but getting the actual power consumption value for a piece of equipment can be elusive. Frank's paper has been accepted for the CMG'08 conference, so anybody interested in power usage factors for equipment will be able to get the data from the conference proceedings, or they can contact Frank at if they are interested in the information now.
Our summer meeting was a great success, and we are looking forward to our fall meeting in November which will be sponsored by Compuware.