November, 2008
by Linwood Merritt
Lin started his data processing career in 1970 as a Simulation Analyst, has been a US CMG member since CMG84, and has been the Project Manager of the "Enterprise Wide Capacity and Performance" project of SHARE since August 1994.
Lin has published 14 CMG papers (not counting 1 additional for UKCMG 2003) and presented at 25 SHARE conferences. He won the CMG97 Mullen award for the presentation "Performance Data from the Server to the Intranet: Getting the Data and Reporting It," and presented it at UKCMG in 1998. He is now working as a mainframe Capacity Planner at Bank of America in Richmond, Virginia.
About the Author
Linwood Merritt, Bank of America
Southern CMG held its fall 2008 meetings in Raleigh, NC on October 17 and Richmond, VA on October 23. The region also booked lunch sponsor EMC Software for both meetings and breakfast sponsor Sysload Software for Richmond. Both vendors gave presentations with excellent technical content that meshed well with presentations from the invited speakers at both meetings. The technical content of both meetings is summarized below.
At the Raleigh meeting, K. Eric Harper's presentation, "Attribute-based Workload Characterization: An Initial Case Study," discussed the combination of workloads and hardware performance measures. Igor Trubin's "Exception Based Modeling and Forecasting" presentation discussed the use of automatic statistical detection of server candidates for detailed modeling and analysis. Chris Molloy presented "Green Data Center: A Case Study," which discussed an energy assessment strategy and included a formula to calculate a site's Power Usage Efficiency. Lin Merritt's presentation, "Using Business Growth Information in Capacity Planning Forecasts," discussed underlying technical details around forecasting techniques that combine resource trending with growth estimates and business driver information supplied by business planners.
At the Richmond meeting, John Yennie presented "Application Response Measurement from Development to Test to Production," which discussed his experience moving mainframe applications to AIX servers and ARM enablement using WebSphere options and runtime probes. Kathy Walsh gave her latest Washington Systems Center "z/OS Hot Topics" including use of the MVS Logger, LSPR workloads and increased CPU per transaction at high utilizations. Also, Jim McGalliard presented "A Benchmark Comparison of Dual- and Quad-Core Processor Linux Clusters with Two Global Climate Modeling Workloads," which compared capacity between the two technologies and concluded that they are relatively close to comparative published floating point ratings. Igor Trubin and Lin Merritt repeated the presentations they had given to at the Raleigh meeting the week before.
The Southern Computer Measurement Group is planning to hold its next meetings in the spring of 2009. Please check the website at http://regions.cmg.org/regions/scmg/meetings.htm for details in the spring. Anyone interested in being a sponsor or presenter or who has any suggestions should contact .