November, 2009
The Southern California CMG Region returned to the Crown Plaza hotel at the Commerce Casino for its fall meeting. This venue provides excellent meeting room facilities, and great food for costs well below other hotels in the area. If a gaming facility is in your geographic location, I would suggest you check it out for a regional meeting. Our fall meeting was sponsored by Sysload Software and we enjoyed a full slate of four speakers.
Our first morning presentation, after the continental breakfast, was a technology overview of the Sysload solution set. Sysload, which is headquartered in France, is a fairly new player in the US systems management space. Their somewhat unique, distributed product architecture made for a very interesting overview and discussion. Ted Dinkel did an excellent job presenting this solution and the company background.
The first technical session of the day was 'Performance Management in Virtualized Environments' by Emmanuel Sauvion. Emmanuel compared all the major virtualization players in the midrange and WinTel technology area. He compared and contrasted the differences in the various hypervisor / operating system implementations and highlighted the impacts these architectures have on our measurement and planning tasks. This is a very timely topic and reinforced how important it is for all Capacity Management professionals to stay current in this quickly moving area.
The second presentation was by Dave Day of Colesoft. Colesoft is a very small company, run out of a renovated farmhouse in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dave Cole (a different Dave than our presenter), founder and owner, is the author of z/XDC; a debugging tool for programmers who code in assembler. A quick trip to Colesoft's website will confirm this unique organizational model (www.colesoft.com/AboutUs/about_us_thecompany.html) and corporate headquarters. Dave Day, who previously worked for Programmart (aka Strobe), has come up with a very simple, yet effective, way to event profile workloads in a z/OS environment by using information in the trace table. He developed this concept on his own and had unsuccessfully attempted to sell it to other software companies until he met Dave Cole from Colesoft. Dave Cole saw the potential with this technology (patent pending) and partnered with Dave Day on the product. The unique aspect of Dave's approach to profiling an address space is to use the existing z/OS trace table as the primary data source for the analysis. This strategy provides a much more granular data source than the traditional state sampling method. z/XPF became available this year and is a great addition to the existing solutions we have to analyze z/OS applications.
The first session in the afternoon was Neil Gunther's presentation on Mongo Measurement and Mongo Capacity Planning. This presentation was adapted from his 2008 Michelson acceptance speech. Neil used the Michelson-Morley experiment and the large hadron collider project to provide a view of what challenges Capacity Managers in the future will have to tackle. Neil's presentation was both professionally relevant to Capacity Management professionals and enjoyable as an insight into to science of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Our final presentation of the day was John Van Wagenen's 2008 Mullen Award winning presentation on managing workloads in a zSeries environment. John was challenged to hold hardware growth flat in the face of a growing business. He developed a variance based workload measurement strategy that allowed him to focus on applications where he could make a difference. John used this methodology for close to five years in the mainframe environment and is now adapting it for the midrange environment. This is an excellent paper and should be read by all Capacity Management professionals.