Connecticut Computer Measurement Group
Announcing our Spring Conference and Vendor Day Meeting
Friday May 11, 2018

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

The first Connecticut Computer Measurement Group conference for the year is slated for Friday, May 11th. This Spring Meeting brings back our popular Vendor Day format, to which we invite many software and hardware companies to exhibit their offerings. Coffee and refreshments are served in the Vendor Hall, and a little more time is permitted between sessions for you to investigate their services. Fees earned on Vendor Day help us to keep our admission prices low during the rest of the year, as well. We have a really outstanding program this year. Please consider attending.
Our spring vendor day conference is made possible with the help of our participating vendors. This year the following vendors will be exhibiting and providing information on their products and services:

VENDORS

IBM    ♦  Intellimagic  ♦   Syncsort  ♦    DataKinetics    ♦  Compuware  ♦  AppDynamics  

We will again utilize an e-mail registration.  Pre-registration fee is $35.00, which includes lunch. 

To pre-register, simply e-mail your intention to attend to [email protected] no later than May 7, 2018 and then pay at the door.   (Note: If you received this document from a CCMG email, then simply reply now to this email with your request to preregister.)

On-site registration fee is $45.00.   Please note that if you have a PayPal account you can now pre-register there by selecting the Send Money button, inserting [email protected] in the “To” box, and choosing the Purchase/Services option.

Preregistration Cost:  $35 ∞ Preregister via email: Send a “Preregister me” email to: [email protected]

8:45 – Combined Session

Blockchain – The Foundation of Bitcoin and Much, Much More – Irwin Kraus, The Blockchain Colloquium

Blockchain has become famous as the underlying technology of Bitcoin. It enables disintermediated trust, immutability, and proof of provenance among many other potentially valuable characteristics.

An example of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), Blockchain is being applied to many applications today outside of cryptocurrencies including supply chain management (SCM), digital rights management (DRM), electronic health records (EHR), electrical power microgrid management, and insurance applications among many others.

This presentation will explain the history of Distributed Ledger Technology and Blockchain, and the value that they promise to provide as disruptive technologies. 

Irwin Kraus has been wrestling computers for fifty years, beginning with early IBM mainframes. In point of fact, he can still BXLE. (This may only be meaningful to a few of you.) Beginning with the United States Marine Corps, Irwin has worked for a number of large enterprise customers as a programmer, system designer, and IT manager. Thereupon losing his senses, he transitioned to working for a number of large vendors (Amdahl, EMC, and Hitachi) and fun startups, all dealing with enterprise solutions.  

Irwin is currently the principal of The Blockchain Colloquium, a consultancy dedicated to the development and delivery of education in this exciting new technology.

 10:30 – Track 1

Kernel Tuning for TCP Performance – Bob Abraham & Stephanie Spinetti, Anthem, Inc. 

As network throughput capabilities increase and response time demands become more aggressive, it becomes more crucial that systems are able to efficiently communicate via TCP. Dropping network packets can jeopardize system throughput and stability, as well as artificially inflate capacity demands, as the overhead of packet retransmissions puts additional load on the CPU and NIC. Through case study review, it can be shown that careful kernel TCP configuration (on any platform) can have substantial impact on a system’s network performance.

Bob Abraham has more than 35 years of systems design, support and tuning of numerous technologies, including mainframe and midrange platforms, and numerous technologies.  Bob threatens to write a book during his retirement years, but he’s still having too much fun in his work.  The book may be titled “All Computers Wait at the Same Speed”.

Stephanie Spinetti stumbled into the field of performance engineering as a college intern and never looked back. In her still-relatively-short career, she has supported, tested, triaged, and tuned systems across multiple platforms, vendors and technologies, both distributed and mainframe. She specializes in analytics, tooling, and incident management.

 10:30 – Track 2

Essential Reporting for Capacity and Performance Management – Dale Feiste, Syncsort

This presentation is, essentially, about reporting for capacity and performance management. 

Dale Feiste is the speaker and he works for Syncsort.

1:00 – Track 1

Move Fast, Follow Everything and Focus on What Matters Most – Keith Leonard, AppDynamics

Today, no one likes or tolerates slow applications – not IT Ops, DevOps teams, CIO’s and most certainly not end users.  This presentation will explain the market as we see it today and discuss some of the current challenges enterprises are faced today. 

Keith Leonard has been a top software salesperson for the past 10 years. Working with large enterprise customers, Keith looks to help customers solve important business problems. He has worked with some of the largest, software, insurance and financial institutions worldwide. Keith currently works for AppDynamics, helping companies in the Northeast solve production application problems.

1:00 – Track 2

Are you a Speed Reader?  – John Baker, DataKinetics

As a kid, I would stay up half the night with my nose in a book. On the other hand, if I spent too much time reading, I was tired and unproductive the next day.  Your systems read (and write) enormous volumes of data as well. While I was only reading a single page at a time, Z systems can read from tape, disk, CF’s, paging, main memory, and multiple levels of processor caches. These areas vary dramatically in size but more importantly they are not accessed at the same speed! One of the greatest challenges in IT today is balancing speeds across various components. The Z14 runs at 5.2 GHz. The key is to make those cycles as productive as possible. We will discuss the many tiers of storage and how to optimize access to these areas. 

John Baker has over 25 years in the IT industry as both a customer and consultant. For the last 20 years, John has focused on mainframe performance and cost optimization. As a customer, John designed, implemented, and maintained many critical projects such as WLM Goal Mode, GDPS/Data Mirroring and merging datacenters. As a consultant, John has assisted many of the world’s largest datacenters withe their z/OS performance challenges. John is a popular speaker at Share, CMG, GSB, and IBM Conferences. He is on the board of directors of CMG and oversees the mainframe content at the annual conference. In 2017, John joined forces with long-time friend and colleague Peter Enrico at Enterprise Performance Strategies and Data Kinetics, the global leader in data performance and optimization. 

2:25 – Track 1

Is my VMware VM getting the CPU it needs?  – Debbie Sheetz, MBI Solutions

This paper extends the methodology presented in 2013: “Capacity Analysis Techniques Applied to VMware VMs (aka When is a Server not really a Server?)” to include deeper CPU analysis (compared with Memory analysis in the previous paper).  This presentation demonstrates a holistic approach which defines and analyzes the relevant group of metrics from each layer of the virtualization, i.e. ESX cluster, host, VM, the VM’s operating system (Linux or Windows), and the application in order to determine if the guest needs to be resized or the ESX environment requires changes.  

Debbie Sheetz joined the Capacity Practice of MBI Solutions, LLC as a Principal Consultant in August 2015.  She provides in and out-of-the-box solutions for capacity and performance questions as a Professional Service, specializing in Distributed Systems platforms and BMC Software’s Capacity Management software.

Originally hired to work on the first version of BEST/1 at BGS Systems, she had 38 years of experience developing and supporting capacity and performance analysis software with BMC Software/BGS Systems. She provided applied solutions for performance analysis and capacity planning challenges for customers, partners, and BMC field consultants.  Based in Customer Support, she worked with product engineering and marketing on refining existing solutions and designing new solutions.  Prior to working on Distributed Systems performance management products, she had extensive involvement with AS/400 and mainframe product support and development.

2:25 – Track 2

TBD 

Venue

Courtyard by Marriott, Cromwell   4 Sebethe Drive · Cromwell, Connecticut   06416

Phone: (860) 635-1001

Preregistration Cost:  $35 ∞ Preregister via email: Send a “Preregister me” email to: [email protected]