November, 2008
by Jaqui Lynch
For over 28 years, Jaqui has been responsible for projects across multiple platforms, including mainframes and UNIX/LINUX systems. From 1991 till May 1999, Jaqui worked at Boston College as the Manager of Systems Services. Jaqui spent 4 years freelance consulting on UNIX and Performance and Capacity Planning and now works for Mainline Information Systems as a Senior Systems Engineer focusing on pSeries and Linux. Jaqui has been involved in CMG since 1988 when she was a founding member of the New Zealand CMG group. She was the President of CMG in 2004 and 2005.
About the Author
Jaqui Lynch, Senior Systems Engineer, Mainline Information Systems
With only a few weeks to go the conference committee and CMG headquarters are busy putting together all the final details for the upcoming CMG'08 conference. We have uploaded the final agenda to our web site. It can be downloaded from:
http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2008/CMG08-Final-Agenda.pdf
Not only is Green IT one of our themes but CMG has also been implementing some Green initiatives. One of these has been that we no longer print handouts. Instead we have uploaded the handouts and they are available via the Online agenda at
http://www.cmg.org/cgi-bin/agenda_2008.pl
You can also put together your own pre-planned schedule using the online scheduler at:
http://www.cmg.org/cgi-bin/conf_sched.pl
If you are a first time attendee then try to attend one of the two first timer sessions (Saturday and/or Sunday) - these will help you orient yourself for the rest of the week. The week starts with an ITIL class that is part of our CMGET (extended training) program. This class runs from Saturday through Monday and requires preregistration. As in previous years we are also offering our workshops on Sunday.
On Monday afternoon our keynote, Steve Sams, Vice President for Site and Facilities Services, IBM will be discussing IBM's Project Big Green which looks at how you can improve efficiency in your data center energy management. This project has allowed clients and IBM to make significant savings in ongoing operational costs. This session kicks off the conference and is followed by regular sessions.
The general session and annual business meeting will be held at 5.30pm and we will walk from there to PARs at Margaritaville. Please try and attend the general session as this will help you orient yourself and will also let you see some of what is involved in running the organization and organizing the conference.
On Tuesday our plenary speaker, Paul Strong, Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay, Inc. will talk about eBay's infrastructure and what it means to our future data center infrastructure and the challenges ahead.
Tuesday we are also hosting the Apdex conference in a conference, a one day meeting of those interested in the Apdex organization and the topics they address. The Apdex agenda can be found at:
http://www.apdex.org/2008ApdexSymposiumProgram_001.htm
And, of course, Tuesday is the day that our exhibit hall opens.
CMG'08 will once again offer the best presentations on Performance and Capacity Management as well as our CMG-T basics training sessions. We will also offer our BOFs (birds of a feather sessions) and vendor training sessions. Most of these will be listed in the final agenda but you should also check the daily newsletter as well as the BOF board.
Hot topics for CMG'08 include IT Service Management, Green IT, Virtualization, Server Consolidation, Service Oriented Architectures, Data Visualization, ITIL, Application Load and Stress Testing and Software Performance Engineering. These are all in addition to our regular sessions on Capacity and Performance Management across platforms, our CMG-T training and our Sunday Workshops.
Virtualization is probably today's hottest global IT initiative. Various implementations of virtualization have been around for more than 30 years; but now, virtualization spans a broader spectrum of platforms than ever before and includes applications (via Software as a Service or SaaS), games such as World of Warcraft, and online environments such as Second Life.
Major drivers of virtualization are Green IT initiatives and of course, cost reductions. The performance and capacity challenges of virtualization not only include provisioning sufficient CPU, memory, storage, etc. to meet the needs of consolidating resources, they also include cost effectively balancing consumer demands on those resources.
2008 is turning into a challenging year but you really can't afford to miss CMG'08 - this is the conference that will help you bring better efficiencies to your company's Information Technology area.
We are all looking forward to the conference and hope to see you there. You can register for the conference at:
http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2008/reg.html
Jaqui Lynch
CMG'08 General Conference Chair