ECM SIG - Previous Meetings

• 2008-10-21 (details) Help! I've been outsourced - Presentation [PDF, Members only] by Ian Davidson (CSC)

  What changes will occur to you if you have just been outsourced or you may be outsourced in the future. How can you expect your job to change? What issues are you likely to encounter? Will this mean that everything will now be done on the cheap?

  Biography: Ian Davidson
  
  Ian has been in IT for over 30 years He joined CSC in 1993 as part of an outsourcing agreement with AMP. Since then he has been involved in a number of other outsourcing agreements. He is currently responsible for configuration and capacity and performance management of mainframe systems for CSC.

• 2008-08-19 (details) On the Run: Architecting and delivering Wintel Virtualisation with VMware accurately - Presentation [PDF, Members only] by Shmuel Markovits (IBM)

  You are not the sys admin, nor have possession or access to the sys console nor do you have sys admin tools but THEY expect you to know.

  You have been asked for a back of an envelope estimate about virtualising a wintel farm in the middle of a meeting. You want to sound authoritive but you don't want to get it wrong. After this presentation you will be able to use reasonable rule of thumbs that the experts use.

  You have offered an estimate but what sort of qualifications should you be adding. Any gotcha's? What, if any, are the limitations that the environment dictates that you need to consider?

  Know how to quickly and accurately assess current performance of your VMs. This presentation will show you how to do this using standard tools supplied with ESX (snapshots from a real servers in a VMware ESX 2.5 and 3.0 data centre).

  Define classes of applications which are the ones you can be confident recommending virtualisation, and be aggressive about their specifications and what class of applications should you preferably be conservative about.

  Know how to mix and match the various applications on the VMs for an optimum performance mix.

  There is plenty of reading material available but what utilities, help guides, help centres, wikis, blogs are out there at the moment that can of use or be brought in to help me easily and quickly.

  After attending this session Shmuel want's his audience to feel confident in assessing a WinTel Virtualisation opportunity and to be able know that engineering and ops can fully deliver to complete customer satisfaction. The topic is about offering rule of thumb knowledge distilled from copious details, that work.

  Biography: Shmuel Markovits
  
  Shmuel Markovits is currently working with the Performance and Capacity team within IBM. Shmuel has extensive software development, testing and deployment experience, worked in diverse industry domains including telecommunications, banking, manufacturing. He has an eclectic range of interests within computer industry. Currently thinks that convergence, mobility, self-adaptation and virtualization should be the focus for the IT professional.

• 2008-06-17 (details) Java Garbage Collection Overview and Analysis, with examples from Websphere Application Server by Steve Jack (St George Bank)
  The topics covered in this presentation include:
  • What is garbage collection?
  • Algorithms available
  • Measuring the impact
  • Rules of thumb

  Biography: Steve Jack, Senior Capacity Planner, St George Bank
  
  In 2008 Steve clocks up 22 years in IT: he began with 2 years development in PL/I, but most of his career has been dedicated to Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis. Steve has worked with most enterprise platforms including the Mainframe, various UNIX implementations, AS/400 or iSeries, Tandem; and also with the Windows platform. He has worked in New Zealand, Britain, and Australia, in both permanent and contract positions. He has had the dubious pleasure of working with Java applications on Mainframe, UNIX, and Windows.

• 2008-04-15 (details) How to start in Capacity Management - your questions answered

  To start - what is Capacity Management?
  It ensures that adequate IT infrastructure is available so work is completed in an acceptable time.

  • Maybe things run slow and you don't know why?
  • Maybe you have had an outage due to a capacity limit on a server that you are responsible for and people are asking if it will happen again.
  • Maybe you need cost estimates for next years budget.
  • Maybe the auditors are asking if your system will last the next year out.

  This is a panel discussion so come along with your questions.

  • What do you measure?
  • What skills are required?
  • What tools are available, and what do people use?
  • Can this be a part-time role?
  • How to get management buy-in?

  The panel will be made up a number of industry experts who have 15-20 years experience in this field and have presented at conferences in Australia, UK and USA on these topics. The panel composition will include:

  • A consultant in this field
  • A practitioner from a large financial institute and
  • A expert for a very large capacity provider

  This discussion builds upon the last session which answered the "Why" with this session which answers the "How".

• 2008-02-19 (details) The Foundations in Capacity Management - Presentation [PDF, Members only] by David Vasey (St George Bank)

  Want to know about Capacity Management but afraid to ask? Then come along to this "Dummies Guide to Capacity Management" - all questions answered. No questions too stupid!

  We will explore the myths:

  • "Hardware is getting cheaper - no need to plan"
  • "We just ask the vendor - he will tell us what we need"
  • Why did Capacity Management go out of fashion?
  • and why is it back in fashion now?
  • Do you think we are soon going to live in a Microsoft dominated world?
  
  or do you think VM Ware and Unix micro partitioning and Linux will have a big impact?
  Biography: David Vasey (St George Bank).

  Just another immigrate escaping the sleet, snow and hail - Born in North of England - English by Birth but Australian by choice.

  David's been in IT since 1979 and worked in Capacity Planning the last 15 years. Still training to be a Nerd - he holds a Degree in Pure Maths and one in Computing. Worked in England, Holland, Malaysia and Australia. Likes: Folk music (now seems to be very un-fashionable), Cycling (getting fashionable) and Living in Australia (The Land of Parks and BBQs).

• 2007-08-21 (details) The Capacity Management of exchange / Windows servers by Carl Stanfield (EMC)

  Capacity management requires a few minutes of your day to crunch some numbers. The results are priceless as you will be able to see how your servers are consuming available resources. This presentation will be looking specifically at the capacity management of exchange / Windows servers.

  You will be able to make purchasing decisions in an intelligent and timely manner and be able to predict the need for additional or replacement hardware before experiencing performance degradation on your existing IT infrastructure.

  Biography: Carl Stanfield, Microsoft Practice Manager; EMC.

  Carl Stanfield has over 3 years experience with EMC and over 10 Years Microsoft Experience across Australia, designing and implementing Microsoft based Solutions. He is currently the Microsoft Practice Manager for EMC and utilised by major customers throughout the Australia and New Zealand.

• 2007-06-19 (details) Swiss Army Chainsaw by Paul Fenwick (Perl Training)

  Wouldn't it be nice if there was a cross-platform language that could monitor systems, identify spam, control applications, automate your house, browse the web, and interface with just about anything? Wouldn't it be better if it were free, open-source, and had more than ten-thousand freely available libraries to extend the language and its capabilities?

  Fortunately there is such a language. Perl, the Swiss Army Chainsaw of programming, is supported on dozens of platforms, and has been used for a mind-boggling array of tasks. Join us for a tour of Perl's capabilities, humour, and most importantly how it can be used to make your life easier.

  Biography: Paul Fenwick, BSc, has more than ten years of commercial experience with Perl, and over eight years experience in teaching Computer Science. He is a writer for The Perl Journal, and maintains Perl's Finance::Quote, Proc::UID, and Business::Payroll::AU::PAYG modules.

  Paul is a regular presenter at Melbourne Perl Mongers, a contributor to the Perl 5 core, and an avid developer. He has used Perl to produce a diverse range of applications across a range of areas, including system administration, monitoring, business and finance, web portals, encryption, statistics, mail processing, and games.

  Paul is involved in improving Perl's features for operating in high-security environments. He is editor of the Perl Commercial Services category for the Open Directory Project.

• 2007-04-17 details - Presentation [PDF 5.2Mb, Members only] How Virtualization Complements New-Generation Hardware by Mike Bookey (VMware)

  Extensive 'scale-out' and multi-tier application architectures are becoming increasingly common, and the adoption of smaller form-factor servers is growing dramatically. Since the transition to high density x86 server architectures is generally driven by a desire for physical consolidation of IT resources, virtualization is an ideal complement for X86 servers, delivering benefits such as resource optimization, disaster recovery, operational efficiency and rapid provisioning.

  The latest generation of x86-based systems feature processors with 64-bit extensions supporting very large memory capacities. This enhances their ability to host many more virtual machines on a physical server deployed within a virtual infrastructure. The continual decrease in memory costs will further accelerate this trend. Likewise, the Quad-core processor technology significantly benefits IT organizations by dramatically lowering the costs of increased performance. Compared to traditional single-core systems, systems utilizing Multi-core processors will be less expensive, since a reduced number of sockets will be required for the same number of CPUs. By significantly lowering the cost of multi-processor systems, Multi-core technology will accelerate data center consolidation and virtual infrastructure projects, Beyond these enhancements, virtualisation software providers are working closely with both Intel and AMD to ensure that new processor technology features are exploited by virtual infrastructure to the fullest extent.

  Biography: Currently working at VMware as a Systems Engineer, Mike Bookey has worked in the IT industry for 20 years. He worked in the Virtualisation industry for 4 years and previous roles include Unix Administrator, Programmer, Storage/Server Architecture, Database Administrator and Consultant.

• 2007-02-20 Details - Presentation [PDF, Members only] by Joely Scott-Thomas, Senior Account Manager for BMC Software Inc.

  Abstract: Get out of the way I can do it faster myself

  Everyday we drive our cars, use public transport, earn & spend money, buy groceries and fly away on holiday maybe. And everyday you deal with people dealing with technology and sometimes we are thinking "Get out of the way I can do it faster myself". Well can we? How can you change what you aren't measuring? How do you know you can do it faster?

  Subjective customer measurement of product & services is delivered everyday to businesses who hope to offer differential products or services. Those businesses could take charge in this measurement, as the key to servicing the customer is to deliver a specific, measurable, actionable, repeatable result in a tight time frame that enables that customer to gain immediate gratification and to be satisfied in the longer term.

• 2006-10-17 Details - Presentation [PDF, Members only] by Neil Stenlake.

  Abstract:
  This presentation takes you through why you would report your Capacity Management magic to people higher up the food chain. We will explore the different audiences, and the difference between Operational, Tactical and Strategic Capacity Management reporting. Finally there will be some advice on the pitfalls and traps you don't want to fall into with your reporting.

• 2006-08-29 Details - Presentation [PDF, Members only] by Steve Jack.

  Abstract:
  Performance Management and Capacity Planning is no longer the domain of systems administrators. IT Managers, Project Managers, Application Development specialists, Web Masters, Systems Programmers, Capacity Planners, Testers, Architects, Performance Tuners and small business IT users all need to be aware of the implications and need to communicate with each other.Capacity Planning overlaps nearly all areas of production computing systems: Service Quality, Databases, Storage, Networks, Systems, Architecture, Development, Testing. Everyone involved neds to help control poor performance, server proliferation, licensing costs, unnecessary upgrades, and even poor availability. This presentation is a high level overview of the various functions. Following the presentation there will be a questions/answers session on Capacity Planning hosted by a panel of CMGA members.