November, 2008
by Anthony Mungal
CMG Canada kicked off its twenty fourth year of operation on October 21st by convening its 1st seminar day for the new 2008/2009 year at the C'est What Restaurant in Toronto.
The expertly crafted program of Carl Kyonka, our Program Chairman, was praised in the evaluations, and overall the attendees were pleased with the speakers, the sessions, the social networking and interactions, and, of course, the exclusivity of the famed, on-premises micro brew.
Our future activities slated for 2009 include:
We are intending both of the above events to be held at C'est What. As usual, membership enquiries, executive contacts, past programs and presentations, in addition to updates to the upcoming program and just about everything else can be found on: http://regions.cmg.org/regions/cacmg
We certainly look forward to having you join us as a speaker or attendee. Here is a run down of how the day progressed:
Wilfried van Haeren, co-founder and president of NetDialog Inc. Canada opened the day with a presentation on "Performance Analysis of WAN based application delivery networks". He discussed how the consolidation and centralization of datacenters has exacerbated the need for organizations to centralize control of their intellectual property and processes to meet regulatory requirements. That coupled with the fact that extended enterprises requires business-critical applications to be delivered over a large geographically dispersed infrastructure. Very nicely done by Wilfried.
Oleksiy Razborshchuk, a Principal Solution Architect with Oracle Corporation Canada followed with a nice coverage of "Real Application Testing with Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition". In this presentation he focused on how real application testing with Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition combined a workload capture and replay feature with an SQL performance analyzer to facilitate the testing of changes against real-life workloads which subsequently allowed some fine tuning of them before they were placed into production. Oleksiy is no stranger to CMG Canada, and his efforts were greatly appreciated by all.
After a nice lunch at C'est What brew/pub - our hosting venue, and just a little of some of the best micro-brew in the city - the challenge was picked by none other than Greg Caliri, a lead technical support analyst at BMC Software and a veteran of CMG circles. Greg's topic was "Trending or Modeling for z/OS Systems - One, the Other, or Both?", and he covered how the incessant growth patterns within the z/OS computing environments were forcing capacity managers to formulate future projections which could be better facilitated by using modeling to enhance predictions and performance implications. Both Greg and his audience had fun with this presentation, and yes, no one fell asleep.
Both Keith Hanna and Mike DenHartog of Teamquest teamed up to deliver an engaging presentation on "Ensuring Service Quality for Optimal Customer Experience". This presentation covered the fundamental concepts for multi-tier analysis and analytical modeling key concepts such as the "stretch factor". It also included a brief demonstration which illustrated the process for executing predictive "what-if" analysis using analytical modeling techniques and tools.
Our closing session was done by another veteran of CMG Canada, John Slobodnik of CGI. John took us through "Predictive Analysis in a Multi-Tier environment using Modeling" in which he showed how to predict whether an application could handle increased load volumes using a high profile multi-tier business application whose architecture consisted of Web Services, WebLogic, LDAP and Oracle layers, running on Windows and Solaris. The approach centered around answering the question as to whether the existing infrastructure was sufficient to make it through the peak sales period.
All together, a day very well spent.