February, 2010
The Southern California CMG Region held its winter meeting at Compuware's Orange Country office. Our meeting was also sponsored by Compuware who provided breakfast and lunch along with the venue. The rainy weather (always needed in Southern California) did not affect attendance as we had over 20 people show up, bearing umbrellas and raincoats.
The program featured two presentations by Chris Lynn, the 2009 J. W. Mullen Award Winner. Chris presented his award winning paper, "Load Testing is Easy, Good Load Testing is Not, Preparation is the difference." This subject brought in many first time attendees to the meeting. Chris also presented his paper on "How Much of Your Midrange Computing Power is Usable" which provided an excellent methodology for accounting for the reserve capacity needed for hardware failover and other contingency planning situations that go into provisioning midrange and Wintel equipment. This helps to explain the low reported usage metrics when the raw capacity of the equipment is reported on.
Barbara Rotondo from Compuware provided an excellent introduction into the types of instrumentation and monitoring that is necessary to capture the true end to end user experience in a multi-tier distributed computing environment. She also compared and contrasted the common methods used to collect this information and process it. This is a key and evolving area as our computing environments change with the introduction of new technologies.
The final presentation of the day was by Frank Bereznay who provided a live demonstration on how to setup your own private cloud computing environment using Amazon's Cloud Computing Service. This presentation was the same material that Adrain Cockcroft presented at the national conference in December. Ignoring the common sense of advice of never doing a live demo, Frank was able to setup and execute the demo program that is part of Amazon's ElasticMapReduce service and it worked the first time. The other amazing part of the this demo was the cost, a whopping 26 cents to process separate files, creating a word index and an analysis of a log file. This new computing paradigm is something every Capacity Management professional needs to become familiar with and the material that Adrain published in December makes it easy for all of use to become Cloud aware. The Cloud computing subject created a very lively discussion among the attendees.
We also held an election at this meeting and the following officers were elected.
Regional chair - Frank Bereznay
Secretary - Shana Bereznay
Treasurer - Yogesh Shah
Director - Perry Gibson