NWCMG 1999 Fall Conference

Northwest Computer Measurement Group 1999 Fall Conference
SAFECO Insurance Plaza, Seattle Washington

Conference Theme: Dynamite Opportunitties for Internet Clientserver Monitoring

When: October 6th, 1999

Registration: 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM

Fee: $20 at the door for a full day conference including lunch!

Location: SAFECO Insurance Plaza

Directions: I-5 and 45th street exit (just north of Seattle) Go east on 45th toward SAFECO Tower (tallest building) The parking lots are located north of 45th avenue off of 11th and 12th streets. Come early! When there is plenty of available parking on these streets. The Safeco garage is for Safeco employees only.

Agenda

8:00-9:00am	Registration Coffee & Continental breakfast provided by Appliant Inc.
8:30-9:00am	"Early Bird" Vendor Presentation by Appliant Inc.
09:00-10:00am	Mark Friedman Demand Technology Windows NT Page Replacement Policies" This paper has been accepted for the upcoming CMG99 conference! The Microsoft Windows NT operating system supports virtual memory on a variety of hardware platforms, the most common being the Intel IA-32 architecture. This paper provides an overview of Windows NT virtual memory management, with a particular emphasis on the hardware-independent mechanism it uses for page replacement. Mark founded Demand Technology in 1992. He is a recognized expert in MVS performance, disk and tape performance, storage management and distributed storage management. Mark is the author of over 40 articles, a regular contributor to trade publications like Enterprise Systems Journal, and is in demand to speak at Computer Measurement Group, SHARE, GUIDE, Storage Management User Groups, the RAID Advisory Board, and meetings of other professional organizations. Mark is esteemed for his ability to communicate complex technical topics in plain, concise terms. He writes, edits and publishes a monthly newsletter, Storage Management. For iccmFORUM, he is the moderator of the Storage Management area, and also a regular contributor.
10:00-11:00am	Nicholas Gloy, Ph.D. Appliant Inc. "Service Level Directed Management of SAP R/3" This paper has been accepted for the upcoming CMG99 conference! The mission-critical nature of SAP R/3 to businesses that use it justifies proactive measures to assure continuous high-quality service. This paper describes an approach for managing SAP R/3 based on service level monitoring and reporting. By focusing IT's attention on the parts of the system that are responsible for service problems, this approach enables IT to improve service quality of SAP R/3 systems, direct resources to true service problems, and avoid costly over-capacitizing. Example scenarios illustrate how proactive monitoring enables SAP administrators to detect problems before they become service disruptions. Nicolas Gloy is an engineer at Appliant, Inc. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University and a B.A. in Mathematics and Computation from Oxford University. He is the author or co-author of many publications on branch prediction and code placement.
11:00-11:15am	Break - Business Meeting
11:15-12:00pm	NWCMG Birds of a Feather (BOF) Hosted by Howard Glastetter Weyerhaeuser "Local area efforts to measure the elephaNT" Before the conference, take a moment to think about your NT information delivery mechanisms. We invite you to share your techniques with others in a NT BOF session! But, be prepared to be amazed, to see your paradigms shake. In this session we shall learn from our peers on the various techniques used to measure the elephaNT. Together we will discuss the art of NT performance analysis, and the delivery systems of NT performance analysis information.
12:00-01:00pm	Lunch - At the Safeco Mariott Cafeteria Provided by our sponsor, Appliant Inc., with an informal discussion with the speakers and NWCMG attendees.
12:30-01:00pm	Vendor Presentation Appliant Inc.
1:00-2:00pm	Brian Marsh Appliant Inc. "Improving Messaging System Management Using Client Service Levels" Enterprise messaging is becoming the number one mission critical application for many corporations. However, management techniques for these systems often ignore client response time, the performance metric that most defines the end-user experience. This paper discusses the advantages of using client service levels to monitor and manage messaging systems. Correlating service levels and system state enables more effective capacity planning, ROI analysis, troubleshooting and helpdesk support. Brian Marsh comes to Appliant from Juno Online Services, where he was Senior Vice President of Engineering. He was the founding engineer and helped build Juno into one of the largest providers of free e-mail and highly-targeted electronic advertising. Brian led the development teams for the award-winning e-mail client, the ad system and demographic database, and the electronic commerce order processing system. When Brian left Juno, the company had three million members and was growing quickly. Prior to Juno, Brian worked on proprietary trading systems for D.E. Shaw & Company. Previously, he directed a research group in Mobile Computing and the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory.
2:00-3:00pm	Lorne Steiner Candle Corporation "Metrics to Measure the End-User Experience" It is not unusual to find distributed applications that are comprised of dozens of interrelated technologies (e.g., middleware, databases, and operating systems) running across a sprawling corporate network. Every one of these technologies introduces another potential performance bottleneck. IT groups, which do an acceptable job of managing these various technologies, typically do not capture the actual response times that end-users experience. Since customers of IT are becoming direct users of applications, there is increased pressure to improve service. Responding to this need, more and more businesses are implementing service level agreements (SLA's). The driving force for this interest is simple - managers know that 75% of business revenue is tied to a few key applications. Metrics to measure the end-users experience will be compared and analyzed to show how the effective use of SLAs from the perspective of the end-user can increase business productivity and end-user satisfaction. Bullet Points: 75% of business revenue is tied to a few critical applications. Distributed Applications are more difficult to manage. Customers are becoming the direct users of applications. Increased pressure to improve service is creating a need for more Service Level Agreements (SLA's) with business units. Increased demand to manage the availability and performance of business applications from the perspective of the end-user experience. Lorne Steiner specializes in the Candle distributed software line of products and services specializing in Application Response Time (ART). Coming from the system engineer realm, he is now tackling his new assignment as Business Development Manager. He is responsible for helping to increase client awareness of how corporate SLA's, combined with the measurement of the true end-user experience, will increase productivity across the enterprise. He is an experienced, persuasive presenter who excels at translating complex technical jargon into compelling, business benefits.
3:00pm	Closing comment from the NWCMG President, Bill McEwen.
A lot of work goes into recruiting, scheduling and advertising these meetings. Also, speakers have spent many hours developing their presentations. Come and spend a day networking with your performance analysis peers in our area and get some state-of-the-art training that would normally cost many times the $20 fee to attend.

Conference Theme:	Dynamite Opportunitties for Internet Clientserver Monitoring
When:	October 6th, 1999
Registration:	8:00 AM to 9:00 AM
Fee:	$20 at the door for a full day conference including lunch!
Location:	SAFECO Insurance Plaza
Directions:	I-5 and 45th street exit (just north of Seattle) Go east on 45th toward SAFECO Tower (tallest building) The parking lots are located north of 45th avenue off of 11th and 12th streets. Come early! When there is plenty of available parking on these streets. The Safeco garage is for Safeco employees only.