August, 2009
by Frank Bereznay
The Summer meeting for the Southern California region was well attended, had a full slate of four speakers, featured a new venue and was sponsored by Mainline Information Systems (www.mainline.com) who also provided two speakers.
The big change was our new venue. We held our meeting at the Commerce Casino. Low room minimums and food costs, great quality food, and best of all, it is a no smoking venue (unlike Vegas and some Indian gaming facilities). Meeting rooms are on the second floor, away from the gaming area, and very quiet. Looks like SCCMG has found a new venue for some of its meetings.
Mainline sponsored our summer again and provided us two great speakers, Ron Gordon and Jaqui Lynch. We really appreciate the support we get from our key technology partners like Mainline. They make it possible for use to use venues like the Commerce Casino and allow us to provide breakfast and lunch to the attendees. Thanks Mainline!
Our first speaker was Dr. Stephen Guendert from Brocade Systems. Stephen's presentation was titled "Understanding the Performance and Management Implications of FICON/FCP Protocol Intermix Mode (PIM)". PIM allows zSeries and Open Systems servers to share a common storage infrastructure, as long as the appropriate software components are in place. In today's world of constant pressure to reduce costs, this is a storage infrastructure strategy that most shops need to consider. Stephen covered all the necessary software prerequisites and provided insights into how this type of an environment could be managed.
Our second presentation was titled "Linux Measurement and Performance Reporting" by Ron Gordon of Mainline. Since the Linux operating systems runs virtually everywhere, Ron's presentation also provided a lot of information on how the various hosting platforms can affect how one should approach managing particular operating system. Ron showed how to view the over 700 parameters that Linux uses and which ones to focus in on for performance management. He also covered the packaging techniques uses by the larger distributors like Red Hat. It was a great introduction and overview of this pervasive operating system that is already part of our IT landscape.
Following lunch, Jaqui Lynch, from Mainline, provided the third presentation, "Power VM Virtualization and Planning". Jaqui has an extensive background in both mainframe (zSeries) and open systems (Power VM / AIX) capacity management experience. And she points out this is a good combination because these two compute environments are merging. Many of the new advancements in the Power VM technology are being implemented by IBM staff who developed similar features for the zSeries technology line in the past. Features line Micro partitioning and workload managers are some examples. Jaqui then provided an overview of the Power VM architecture, especially CPU technology and how this plays into workload characterization and consolidation planning. For those of us with mainframe capacity planning skills the contemporary Power VM / AIX environments provide a great opportunity to leverage these skills.
Our final presentation of the day, "Using the Survival Statistical Technique to look for Changes in a Data Population that is not normally distributed", was presented by Brian Barnett from Bank of America. Brian is a long time user of statistical techniques to gain insight into instrumentation data. He recently came across a situation where the sampling distributions extracted from some data populations were not sufficiently 'normal' to allow standard statistical inference to work, he was getting way too many false positive conditions making the overall effort ineffective. Looking for alternatives, he came across Survival Analysis, a non-parametric, technique used to measure time to an event. Brian describes how he adapted this technique to his problem at hand and found it an effective technique to look for changes in a large family of explanatory variables which contributed to increases in response time. This presentation and paper has been accepted for the CMG National conference this December so be sure to look for it. This presentation rounded out a full day of great information sessions and networking opportunities for the attendees.
Our fall meeting will be November 6 at the Commerce Casino and will be sponsored by Sysload. Please check the CMG calendar of events for more details as we get closer to the meeting date.