June, 2009
by Anthony Mungal
Hard to believe that another CMG Canada April Conference has come and gone, but it's true. We are grateful for the many speakers and attendees who made the event special and memorable. Even the Toronto weather cooperated as we enjoyed the typical spring weather - cool days, sunshine, some greenery emerging, and the overall promise of much better weather ahead. The conference venue was the same as last year - C'est What Restaurant and Microbrew in downtown Toronto. Many commented on the unique ambiance that this place offered, with the cozy meeting room and the convenient meal and bar facilities. The microbrews they offered were truly unique within this populous city and in some way afforded us, as an appreciative group of professionals, a nice casual atmosphere within which intellectual curiousity and healthy discussion can be allowed to run rampant - and it did during the members networking session at the end of day one.
If you missed out on the opportunity to attend some, or all, of this years CMG Canada Conference, you can view or download the presentations at http://regions.cmg.org/regions/cacmg/index.html. Better still, plan on attending next years event.
The first day was led off by Dr. Steve Guendert who is a Mainframe Global Solutions Architect at Brocade. Steve indulged us in discussing the "FICON/FCP protocol intermix mode (PIM)", which is a common storage network that has been supported by IBM since early 2003, yet it has not seen widespread adoption among end users for a variety of reasons. He discussed how recent developments such as the new System z10, Node Port Identifier Virtualization (NPIV), virtual fabrics, and other advances in storage networking management contribute to make PIM a more compelling technological strategy for the end user, thereby enabling better utilization of capacity and operational cost savings. Judging from the evaluation responses, this presentation and ensuing discussion was very well received by this enthusiastic audience.
The next session was offered up by yours truly and was entitled "Multi-Core Computing and the Tiered Storage Model". This talk focused on how multi-core and multi-processing computing trends affect application deployments and the pronounced effect it has on the I/O subsystem. It scrutinized topic areas such as data growth, access patterns, traffic characterization, and the working set and undertook a discussion of how they justified the need for technologies such as larger drives, flash disks, multi-tiering, dynamic cache partitioning, virtual provisioning and the like. It also delved into the technologies, their lifetime expectancies, and their suitability to various workloads and applications. This talk was also very well received and in some ways set the tone for many later discussions by subsequent speakers on the role, deployment, and overall effects of multi-core computing.
Then came the first "after lunch" session on "Automating Batch and Saving Money" which was valiantly delivered by Martin Wills of MVS Solutions. Martin has over forty years of experience in the mainframe environment and is a frequent speaker at forums such as CMG and SHARE. He discussed how ThruPut Manager Automation Edition (AE) could be used to deliver the objectives of cutting costs while at the same time becoming more service oriented. He showed how full automation of z/OS batch, according to service goals you set, can be managed through every stage of processing in conjunction with JES2 and WLM right from submission through execution. Good talk - well received.
After a well deserved short break - the lunch and microbrews has its own way of dictating afternoon behaviour - the rest of the day belonged to a good friend of CMG Canada, the person of Jim Elliott of IBM Canada.
Jim Elliott is a Consulting Sales Specialist for System z at IBM Canada and enjoys a thirty five years plus career at IBM. Note that his preference is in stating his career time as "thirty five years plus", instead of the actual number - his rationale being that he doesn't want to start quoting the years in hexadecimal. Jim did two consecutive talks. His first one was on "Building a Dynamic Infrastructure - Trends and Directions for System z". This talk focused on how today's interconnected and data consuming applications are changing the dynamics of IT. He suggested that as content serving, real-time business intelligence, and high performance computing functions continue to be more tightly coupled with mission critical applications, they become vital to the operational success of core business transactions. His session summarized the key milestones in 2008 for System z and provided detailed plans on how to deliver a comprehensive solution for today's increasingly multi-tier and multi-architecture application landscape. For those who missed this session, you missed a treat, and I would suggest that you get a copy of Jim's slides.
In Jim's second session, and I confess that he must have felt somewhat pressured given that he was between the crowd and the networking session (with microbrews) to follow, he discussed "Linux on System z - A Strategic View". This talk also was very well received given the increasing popularity of Linux in the system z environments. He emphasized how datacenters today have a key architectural choice to make in designing large-scale implementations, and posed the question of whether the better approach was to scale-out with rack-optimized servers or to scale up with large SMP servers using virtualization facilities so that you can run many images on a single server. Along the way his talk covered areas involving z/VM, IFLs, and multi-core concepts. A great way to tie together a long, but enjoyable and totally stimulating day.
Day two began every bit as intellectually aggressive as day one. It was led off by Kellman Meghu who is the Security Engineering Manager in Canada for Check Point Software Technologies Inc., the worldwide leader in securing the Internet. Kellman is no stranger to CMG Canada - his talks are always very penetrating, and his appeal far reaching. We were very pleased to have him. His topic was on "Software Blades" and he undertook a lively discussion on how multi-core architectures have brought a new level of power to the end users. However, without the software being specifically tuned to take full advantage of it, there was no perceivable benefit to much of the new hardware coming from open systems. This led to a discussion of Software Blades which could be quickly enabled and configured into a solution based on specific needs, and further, as needs evolved, additional blades could be quickly activated to extend security to an existing configuration within the same hardware foundation.
The next morning session was on "Using TeamQuest Model in an Oracle 10G RAC Environment", and this was presented by John Slobodnik of CGI. John shared with us a modeling/capacity planning tool to correctly identify the need for an upgrade in an Oracle 10G RAC clustered environment. This proved to be a very interesting session.
The first afternoon session was made by Alon Ben-Shoshan who is the Marketing Manager at Correlsense Ltd and his topic was on "Business Transaction Management - The Next Generation of IT Performance Management". In this talk he focused on how Business Transaction Management was seeking to provide "good old Mainframe visibility and reliability" to distributed systems. The concept he proposed was to simply track every single transaction from the moment it was initiated by the end user, through the proxy, web server, load balancer, application server, message broker, all the way to the database and mainframe. Upon doing this on a 24 x7 basis, any service degradation or outage could be identified and along with it - its root cause.
Jan Warren of Enbridge Gas Distribution, having worked in various capacities in the IT industry for nearly 30 years, undertook this next session on "Performance Testing vs. Performance Monitoring". Jan discussed how performance monitoring as a practice allows us to see how our applications, as well as the hardware (servers, network, switches, etc.) and software behind the scenes are behaving in real time. This, she said, is a bit different from performance testing, which not only tests the performance of applications before they go into production, but also whether the software that is written even works or not. A good discussion ensued.
Our wrap up session for the conference and our CMG Canada year was from none other than Don Melton - our membership chairman. Don is a Principal Consultant with Vatic Technologies and he was happy to continue the long standing tradition of "Don's Diatribe", this being installment #IX. Yes, this was the ninth iteration, and it proved to be very stimulating in that it identified some of what he believed to be the most significant recent technology changes in the IT industry. The format of this talk was such that it elicited audience comments and discussion on these topics. As usual, it was lively, long and well worth the time. We look forward to iteration X next year.