July, 2008
by Mary Karlins
The Portland Area CMG (PACMG) meeting was held on June 11, 2008, at Con-way Incorporated in Portland. The meeting was sponsored by PerfCap Corporation, and they provided breakfast and lunch for the attendees.
The first two presenters were from PerfCap Corporation. Phil Logsdon gave an overview of their PAWZ product. Next, Dr. Prem Sinha gave a talk on Capacity Planning using Headroom Analysis. He discussed the issues in enterprise capacity planning with thousands of decentralized, heterogeneous servers and presented a methodology that defines and uses "Remaining Headroom" as a composite metric for capacity projections. The Remaining Headroom metric uses all the aspects of system performance that affect end-to-end response time. He also discussed how Remaining Headroom can be used as a key performance index to automate and manage capacity risk management.
M .Edward Borasky of ADP Dealer Services gave a talk on Operation Queuing Analysis of the Linux Block I/O Layer. The Linux block I/O layer manages block devices such as disk drives and SANs. The presentation described the counters maintained by the block I/O layer and built an operational model of a block device using these counters. The results of this model during I/O-intensive benchmarks were presented.
Following lunch, Catherine Liu of Applied Expert Systems (AES) presented Mainframe Virtualization and Network Management. She described the challenges of on-going network management in mainframe and open systems virtualization environments and discussed sample solutions.
Bijorn Schulze of Con-way Incorporated closed the day's sessions with a talk on Oracle Architecture Solutions. His talk described the more common Oracle architectures and how these architectures address availability and scalability.
The next PACMG meeting will be Wednesday, September 17, 2008, at Con-way Incorporated.
PACMG Board Members
Chair
Secretary
Treasurer
Director
Director
Director
Director
Timothy M. Hill
Mary E. Karlins
De France Clark
Cathy Nolan
Frank Bereznay
Brent Holm
M. Edward Borasky