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Rocky Mountain CMG – Winter ‘19 Forum
December 5, 2019 @ 8:15 am - 4:30 pm MST
Free8:00 Registration, 8:15 AM – 4:30 PM Presentations
Held at: Room 533
IBM Corporation
4700 S. Syracuse, Denver, CO 80237
719-930-3326 (for directions ONLY)
Happy Hour/Meet-n-Greet @ The Fresh Fish Co afterwards
hors d’oeuvres and first round courtesy of our sponsor Syncsort
RMCMG is proud to present another forum filled with our usual information packed, relevant, and actionable presentations. Please register with us (at [email protected]; [email protected] or 703-652-6293) so we know how many to plan for. We look forward to seeing you on the 5th of December.
Please pass along this invitation to others so we can expand our membership
Beyond the Agenda Summary below are detailed descriptions of the presentations and biographies of our speakers.
Special notes:
RMCMG is offering this seminar series FREE OF CHARGE to any attendee (this includes remote attendees). This is made possible by the generous support of Syncsort Corporation, our keynote sponsor, and by donation of meeting space by IBM Corporation.
Remote Attendance: Some of our members are tied down on business travel or find a hundred-mile round-trip commute (not unheard of in the Rocky Mountain Region) to be a bit over-the-top….. We attempted Remote Attendance on a trial basis several times in 2011 and 2012 and found it to be quite reliable and effective. We’re now extending it to our entire membership. Contact Dave Halbig ([email protected] or 703-652-6293) for particulars.
Agenda Summary
08:00 08:15 Registration (Continental Breakfast provided in adjacent break room)
08:15 08:20 Welcome, Agenda Review (Dave Halbig)
08:20 9:30 Echoes – Thinking about old and new Cybersecurity issues
9:30 10:00 Break
10:00 11:30 First Bite of the AI Apple: Capacity Planning for AI deployments
11:30 1:00 Is Machine Learning the Solution to Your Capacity Management Challenges*
(and Lunch – pick up your lunch from the break room next door)
1:00 2:30 Ansible – Server Administration at Scale
2:30 3:00 Break
3:00 – 4:30 How to Scale in the Cloud (Chargeback is Back, Baby!)
* – keynote and sponsor
Agenda Detail
Morning (1)
Echoes – Thinking about old and new Cybersecurity issues
Charles Reddan, PhD
Colorado Tech University
About the Presentation:
With daily news of new cyberattacks, people may wonder how to keep up with new threats. This presentation will put new events in the context of older better-known threats that we have had to deal with in the past. Is there “nothing new under the sun”, or are these new and unique?
About the Speaker:
Charles Reddan is the campus program chair for Computer Science and Technology at Colorado Technical University. His background is in operating system development and support, computer networking, and performance analysis & tuning for MCI, AT&T Bell Labs, EDS and HP. Of necessity, many debugging issues and performance related issues have led down into the murky world of security issues.
Morning (2)
First Bite of the AI Apple: Capacity Planning for AI deployments
Rick Lebsack
IBM Corporation
About the Presentation:
The discussion of AI solutions has exposed the requirement to plan for capacity. Historically, most enterprise workloads come with a degree of consistency along with repeatability from run to run. Well, in this new age of developing AI assisted applications the development side of the equation has changed. No longer will a test run have consistency, no longer will resources be shared so that utilization is the primary measure of efficient use of resources.
There are two events in the journey to AI where the capacity planner will get involved — initial creation of the resource pool and ongoing measurement of efficiency. This presentation will introduce one approach to capacity planning and ongoing measurement of an AI resource grid. Hopefully we will have spirited discussion on this new topic for capacity planning.
About the Speaker:
Rick Lebsack has been active in IT circles around Denver since 1982. We could say he cut his teeth on the 3081 processor. He has worn many hats in his career from SE to Consultant across mainframes to storage to open systems to systems management. He has experience with all. Currently Rick is an Executive Systems Architect in Denver where he covers the map on Infrastructure and the Software it takes to enable it. In his spare time he is currently a board member and past-President of CMG working to sustain and enhance the CMG experience for all.
Noon Keynote
Is Machine Learning the Solution to Your Capacity Management Challenges?*
Charles Johnson
Syncsort Corporation
About the Presentation:
Today’s organizations continue to search for ways that technology can provide improve their IT business processes and to find ways IT can provide competitive advantage. Machine Learning is one of the tools that has begun to deliver breakthroughs in delivering the sort of improvements that companies are continually searching to find.
There is an increased use of Machine Learning in Capacity Management and Workload Optimization processes.
We see an increasing desire in the marketplace for a better understanding of Machine Learning and how it works. Specifically, there is a need to understand how combining Machine Learning and Capacity Management work together to dramatically improve their Capacity Management efforts.
Join us to learn:
- What is Machine Learning?
- Key terminology used when working with Machine Learning
- Benefits of Machine Learning for Capacity Management
About the Presenter:
Charles is a Senior Technical Consultant for Professional Services at Syncsort. He has over 30 years professional experience in computer systems performance engineering, capacity management, systems, and database administration. Charles has worked in many industries including Outsourcing, Financial and Insurance
* – Keynote and Sponsor
Afternoon (1)
Ansible – System Administration at Scale
Ronda McCain
IBM Corporation
About the Presentation:
When Distributed Systems made their stage entrance several decades ago, System Administrators were dealing with a few interconnected servers. Not a problem for the heroic System Admin. However, the ‘few’ became ‘dozens’. “Dozens’ became ‘hundreds’, and in some cases, ‘thousands’. Maintaining server populations at this scale became the natural domain of automation.
Ansible provides a flexible approach to automation and execution on accounts. It provides a straightforward path to cloud implementations.
About the Presenter:
Ronda McCain has a background in both Mainframe and Distributed Storage. She has been with IBM 20 years. Ronda is an experienced Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) with over 36+ years of demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. In 2019 Ronda moved into the IBM Automation Innovation team where she is leading a major initiative for North America in the deployment of Ansible Automation. Ronda has been involved with RM-CMG for many years and volunteered as a board member.
Afternoon (2)
How to Scale in the Cloud
(Chargeback is Back, Baby!)
Neil Gunther, Ph D.
Performance Dynamics
About the Presentation:
The need for system administrators—especially Linux sys admins—to do performance management has returned with a vengeance. Why? The cloud. Resource consumption in the cloud is all about run now, pay later (AKA “chargeback” to mainframers). This talk will show you how performance models can help to find the most cost-effective deployment of your applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The same technique should be transferable to other cloud services.
About the Presenter:
Neil Gunther, M.Sc., Ph.D., has been a member of CMG since 1993. In 1994, he started his own research, consulting, and education company: Performance Dynamics (perfdynamics.com). Prior to that, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC and manager of the performance group at Pyramid Technology Corp. (acquired by Siemens AG in 1995). Dr. Gunther received the A.A. Michelson Award in 2008 and was elected a senior member of both ACM and IEEE in 2009. He is also a member of American Mathematical Society and the American Physics Society.
Find him onTwitter: @DrQz.
Cost and Registration Options:
(A continental breakfast, a served lunch, and beverages for all two meals are included in the registration fee – meat and vegetarian options will be available for lunch)
And, as a bonus, we’re hosting an off-site meet-n-greet immediately following the seminar – the hors d’oeuvres and first round will be covered by our sponsor. The off site is at The Fresh Fish Company
Pre-registration fees: Pre-registration options
(NONE… NONE…NONE) (see below)
Seating is limited; make your on-line reservations early. PLEASE send us an email that you intend to come so we can plan accordingly. Send your intent to:
or
About CMG
The Computer Measurement Group is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting.
CMG members are primarily concerned with performance evaluation of existing systems to maximize performance (e.g. response time, throughput, etc.) and with capacity management where planned enhancements to existing systems or the design of new systems are evaluated to find the necessary resources required to provide adequate performance at a reasonable cost.
For more information about this meeting or for dates and topics for future Rocky Mountain CMG meetings, please contact: Dave Halbig at (303) 967-7753. The calendar for this and all other CMG meetings can be found at: http://www.cmg.org/cgi-bin/calendar_2010.pl?format=cal
Are you on the RMCMG email list? Send your email address and other contact information to Blaine Gaither : blaine @acm.org