February, 2009
by Frank Bereznay
Our final meeting of 2008 was held Friday, November 14, at COMPUWARE's Irvine office. Our region really appreciates the ongoing support from COMPUWARE. They allowed us to use their venue for the meeting and also provided a continental breakfast and lunch for the attendees.
COMPUWARE lead off the day's presentations with a discussion of Business Service Management and how this discipline is so critical in today's distributed, heterogeneous computing environments. The benefits of this type of discovery and monitoring process benefits not only the Capacity Management discipline but also many other Data Center Management areas like incident management, asset management, and availability management.
Brian Barnett, from Countywide Financial (now Bank of America), shared the work he is doing to extend the Multivariate Adaptive Statistical Filtering (MASF) techniques for a server monitoring program he leads. This framework, developed by Jeff Buzen and Annie Shum in 1995, still represents industry best practices for exception based reporting schemes. Brian's extension to the basic framework provided many valuable management notifications for the business owners of the applications being monitored.
Our last presentation of the day was Tom Bell, who has updated and revised his retirement planning presentations to reflect the dramatic downturn of the economy last October. As dramatic as the October events were, Tom put them in historical perspective and showed that it is still less than other economic downturns that took place in the 70's and 80's. Instead of a doom and gloom perspective, this current situation represents an opportunity for the careful planner.
The Southern California region held three meetings in 2008 and looks forward to a similar number of meetings in 2009. Check the calendar of events for the dates and locations for these meetings.