Autumn Conference Meeting

Friday October 19, 2018

To be held at the Courtyard by Marriott, Cromwell. All are welcome and Wi-Fi is available.

Our autumn regional conference is coming next month and although we’re still putting together the finishing touches we have another great program already in place.  Again, we have very strong topics including those from our sponsor, Syncsort.   We want to thank them for helping to solidify the day for us.

We are in the process of arranging presentations in both the mainframe and distributed disciplines. We will let you know as soon as those are finalized.  It promises to be an exciting day with great learning and networking opportunities.

Our autumn conference is made possible with the help of this meeting’s sponsor:

Syncsort  is a global software company specializing in Big Data, high speed sorting products, and data integration software and services, for Hadoop, Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux, and mainframe systems.

Preregistration Cost: $45 (Walk-ins $55) ∞ Deadline to preregister via email is October 15 ∞

Simply reply now to this email with your request to preregister. Or, at any time you can notify us by sending a “Preregister me” email to [email protected] . 

Please forward this announcement to your friends and colleagues who might be interested in our conference. Remember, you do not have to be a CMG member to attend our meetings.

IBM z14 Hardware Overview

Ellis Holman, IBM

This presentation will cover the following:

• z14 Design Principals
• z14 Details
• z14 Processor Design and Structure
• z14 Memory Design and Structure
• z14 New and Interesting
• z14 I/O
• z14 Power and cooling
• Site Tools
• HMC
• z14 Upgrades and MES
• Software support for the z14

Methods of Forecasting for Capacity Management

Dale Feiste, Syncsort

Forecasting is the process of making statements about events in the future. Events related to capacity management are typically things like the state of resource consumption, service levels, and computing environment changes at future points in time. Making statements or predictions about these future events requires analysis of information to determine a future state. Knowing what information is needed to make accurate forecasts is a critical step for any analysis.

Forecasts are made to answer questions. Understanding the questions, and things that affect answers to those questions, is the first step to creating an accurate forecast. Required accuracy of a forecast should determine which methods are used to create it. Assumptions can be made to limit the amount of data and time required for creating forecasts. Validating forecast accuracy, after events happen, is an important part of continually improving future forecasts, and building credibility. This paper describes the important task of forecasting as it relates to capacity management.

• Why do we forecast?
• Forecasting scenarios
• Forecasting Techniques
• Forecasting and Virtualization

Evaluating Performance and Capacity with Calculated Metrics

Dale Feiste, Syncsort

Direct measurement of component properties is the foundation of evaluating a systems behavior. Various types of measurement can be formulated into counters that are useful for analysis. Examples are snapshots, counts, rates, percentages, percent, maximums, minimums, averages, etc… Information systems composed of many hardware and software components typically provide these sorts of metrics related to performance and capacity. Storing data for historical analysis is a cornerstone of performance and capacity evaluation. Many counters supplied by hardware and software are created by direct measurement, and others are derived by indirect means.

Understanding how a counter is derived can be important to knowing its limitations and usefulness. Creating your own calculated metrics can also be useful for many purposes. They provide new insight into correlations when charting, simple unit changes, or completely new results with formulas from areas such as queuing theory. This paper outlines the importance of understanding what performance counters represent, and how your own calculated metrics can be used to enhance performance and capacity analysis.

• How measurements are taken
• Time dimension
• Metric limitations
• Creating your own calculated metrics
• Extending into other areas

Bios

Ellis Holman

Ellis Holman is an Open Group certified infrastructure architect who works in the Finance, Insurance and Government industries. He has a wealth of knowledge from working on the client side, at consulting firms and IBM. Ellis began his career with IBM as a consultant. He has worked with many clients over the years performing assessments, health checks, network engineering, and performance analysis and tuning. He has Ph.D.’s in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Ellis holds a master certification for the z System platform, is a Cisco CCNA, and has certified for network engineering in a high voltage environment. He also holds CISSP, PMI, UX Master Certification and is ITIL V3 foundation certified.

Dale Feiste

Dale is a consultant at Syncsort with over 20 years of experience in systems performance and capacity management. He has broad knowledge in many aspects of capacity management and performance engineering and has worked at some of the largest financial firms in the United States. In addition, he has held many certifications across a diverse set of technologies and has a bachelor’s degree in computer information systems.

Again, Connecticut CMG would like to thank Syncsort for their sponsorship and participation in this Autumn Conference.

Check our website https://www.cmg.org/us-regions-2/cmg-connecticut/ regularly for next meeting updates.