November, 2008
by Julie Hughes
The Greater Atlanta Computer Measurement Group (GACMG) met on October 22, 2008, in the Bank of America Building at 715 Peachtree Street in Atlanta.
The meeting started with a presentation by Martin Wills from MVS Solutions concerning managing your batch solutions - automatically. His company provides software to manage batch processing and to speed-up initiation and balance initiators.
Our next presenter was Ted Scott from the US Army Reserve. He explained the ITIL Service Catalog that they have developed to use for deploying new software and assuring its quality. He specifically pointed out great "do's and don't's" that they learned concerning when the service catalog needs more detail (for example - connect server to users at location A) and when the catalog has too much information (for example - location B has x number of users). Ted noted that they are considering several vendor solutions to their expanding requirements, but that they designed their current internal catalog according to broad vendor recommended guidelines.
Due to our morning sessions expanding the suggested time schedule, our next speaker, Tim Browning, said that he didn't mind us eating while he talked, so the group munched on a box lunch while he spoke. Tim, who works at Coca-Cola Enterprises, taught us some new mathematical tricks. His presentation was titled "The mathematics of Capacity Planning and Performance Management - Simplified." He had a spreadsheet with a sample containing a set of numbers and explained how outliers can distort the number collection and cause the average to be distorted. The outliers can be deleted in order to preserve the numbers, or one can use a weighted-average methodology to make an effective solution for the outlier problem. Tim's presentation helped everyone re-visit mathematical terminology not heard in everday office conversation. By the way, Tim did get to eat his lunch during the next presentation by Emmanuel Sauvion.
After lunch, Emmanuel Sauvion from Sysload told us about "Performance Management in a VM World." The Sysload solution for server statistics starts with a collector on each machine. The information has a small footprint and machine load. The product strength involves identifying servers that can be virtualized.
Kevin Mobley, our GA-CMG president from The Ian Thomas Group, spoke about a recent success with a bank. His presentation title was "Removing a One Lane Bridge From an Application to Save $250M and Using Six Sigma to Prove It." In particular, his company was able to find an application bottleneck, suggest and implement improvements, and save a lot of money for the bank. Of course, someone had to ask Kevin how much he was able to take home. As our culture is used to political correctness (especially these days near major elections) Kevin smiled and changed the subject. Way to go Kevin and company! Save money - yeah!
Speaking of saving money, our wrap-up discussion included a survey of participants talking about the current fallen economy and how our employers can reduce spending. Current literature contains information about many companies saving by using less electricity and making other efficiency changes. Even changing to more efficient light bulbs can help reduce energy requirements.
GACMG wishes to thank MVS Solutions and Sysload for their sponsorship. The conference was free to attendees, but pre-registration was requested in order to plan for provisions. Also, thanks to the Bank of America for the use of their facilities.