November, 2009
by David Halbig
On Tuesday, October 1, an audience of practitioners, developers, and researchers gathered in south Denver to attend the all-day Fall Forum offered by the Rocky Mountain Computer Measurement Group (RMCMG).
The theme was Virtualization and Cloud Computing. This was neither the first, nor will it be the last, RMCMG forum offered on the broad technical subject of virtualization.
Speakers were from Oracle, EMC, OpTier, First Data Corp, and IBM. Each of the presentations were highly interactive with the attendees.
Dan Magenheimer, former principal research scientist at HP Labs and now Oracle consulting engineer for the Xen-based OracleVM hypervisor, spoke about his research on memory management problems with multiple guest virtual machines (VMs) and his solutions, "Transcendent Memory".
Scott Dougherty arrived equipped with many years experience and over 300 slides to present on "Performance and Monitoring for the Private Cloud," contrasting various technologies.
Lunch was sponsored by OpTier where Eva Tuczai, formerly of IBM Tivoli, presented OpTier's unique approach to End-to-end Business Transaction Management. RMCMG and its members thank OpTier for their support and for further insight into the value of response time measurement technology.
RMCMG's own Chairman, David Halbig, gave an insider's view of performance troubleshooting in the interests of the customer across technology organization domains in Closing the WTF to NTF Gap where acronyms were left as an exercise to the reader.
Finally, RMCMG co-chair Clea Zolotov had coaxed Chris Molloy of IBM to travel from North Carolina to present "Cloud Computing for Capacity Planners." Chris took the audience from the depths of "you CP people are hosed" to feint glimmers of hope, "you're not quite as hosed as it looks."
RMCMG thanks each of the speakers for their time and work to give their insights into current technical (and organizational) challenges.