Every data center manager must incorporate techniques, processes, systems and people to run a seamless and smooth operation. This track of sessions offers information on general management and business topics, covering everything from applications to technology issues.
The following sessions are from the Spring 2008 conference:
DCM02: z/OS Batch Basics
Martin Wills, Senior Product Specialist, MVS Solutions, Inc.
Are you new to the batch world? This session reviews fundamental batch terminology and its relevance to current situations. It covers classes, job queues, JES2 and WLM initiators and the typical problems faced when trying to meet the overnight batch window production schedule, as well as the legitimate demands of your developers for good turnaround. With plenty of time for Q&A, you do not want to miss this informative session.
DCM03: Using ILM to Advance Corporate Business Goals
Dan Crain, CTO, Brocade Communications
Data center managers are suffering death by a thousand buzzwords—ILM, HSM, SAN, CAS, virtualization, tiered storage, compliance, and so on. This is the result of the development of new and more complex operating systems, file systems, and large-scale applications. The key step for IT management to take in surviving the buzzword blizzard and managing the onslaught of mission critical data is to master the art of information lifecycle management (ILM). This presentation examines the fundamentals of successful ILM and explains why, rather than being just another buzzword, ILM holds the key to harnessing the power of enterprise file systems, block storage, and databases to align IT operations with achievement of overall corporate business goals.
DCM04: The Compliance Equilibrium and the Evolving Role of the Data Center Professional
Rob Gardos, CEO, GridApp Systems
As compliance auditors continue to implement regulatory mandates set by SOX, HIPPA, PCI, and other regulatory measures at the data level, it is crucial that data center managers understand the importance of the database tier in meeting compliance requirements. This educational session will teach you how to develop a customized road map for achieving compliance within the data center. It will also identify tools and resources to best help you understand the data center manager’s evolving role, including an initiation tip card to get you started.
DCM05: What You Need to Know About ITIL Version 3
Rich Schiesser, President, RWS Enterprises, Inc.
The long-awaited Version 3 of ITIL has arrived! So how does it stack up? What features are in it that directly affects your service desk? Does V3 really live up to expectations? And what exactly are those expectations, especially as they pertain to your service delivery and service support activities? This session will answer all these and many other questions about ITIL V3. Come hear what is new and what has changed. This enlightening and entertaining presentation will include numerous real-life examples to illustrate the speaker’s points. You will not be disappointed.
DCM06: Building Synergy across Your Data Center Support Teams
Don Denning, Critical Facilities Manager, Lee Technologies
This session will review the typical data center support teams, how they work today and how their workflow can improve. The type of teams covered are: IT (hardware, software), Networking, Facilities (critical electrical, critical cooling, basic engineering), and Vendors (internal, external). In the presentation, the attendee will receive an overview of the major support teams in a critical data center and their day-to-day operations. It will describe methods for creating synergy between the teams to enhance productivity and reliability and reduce inessential actions.
DCM07: Have You Countered the Cost of Functional Creep in Your Data Center?
Gregory Goode, Senior Project Manager, The Frame Group PTY, Inc.
There was once a definitive line between a data center’s supporting facility infrastructure and IT equipment/network. Today that line is blurred and is expected to disappear, due to the convergence of facilities and IT management. This convergence is recognized as functional creep. This session discusses these new challenges and provides insight as to how to overcome the cost of functional creep in your own data center.
DCM08: The Data Center Skills Shortage: Are You Prepared for the Inevitable?
Sandip Gupta, President, Netmagic Solutions
Industry experts have been talking about an imminent skills shortage in the data center for the past few years. The fact is that data center professionals possess specific skills that just are not being taught in school. Is your organization prepared for this loss of talent? This presentation will focus on real-life solutions to this very real problem, including in-house training programs, new certification training, outsourcing partnerships, automation and what the vendor community is doing to keep the data center running with new technologies. The talent pool is shrinking; come to this session and begin to develop a plan for the future of your data center.
DCM09: Extending the Value of Core Legacy Systems
Claudio Cozzi, Engineer and Chief IT Architect, IBM Corporation
Many core information technology systems in global companies have been in service for years—even decades. Developed on and optimized for legacy platforms, these systems are difficult to integrate to new technologies such as Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA). They also lack the flexibility to adapt quickly to changing business requirements. The convergence of SOA and mainframe technologies can help enterprises liberate these core business assets by making it easier to enrich, modernize, extend and reuse them well beyond their original scope of design. This presentation will describe application modernization through SOA. Attendees will learn several techniques and be given examples of case studies where these techniques were applied successfully.
DCM11: How Network Behavior Analysis Improves Security, Operations and Application Availability
Charles Kaplan, Chief Technology Strategist, Mazu Networks
This presentation will discuss how network behavior analysis (NBA) systems provide continuous global visibility into network activity to enable improved network and security operations, and how NBA solutions fit into network environments as part of a balanced strategy. These NBA systems dramatically reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot network and security issues and provide critical information for accurate planning. Learn how this can help you optimize your network infrastructure to support the business, secure your internal networks, and maximize application availability.
DCM12: Moving to a Virtualized Environment
Jeff Schultz, Enterprise Performance Specialist Manager, TeamQuest Corporation
Today’s organizations are increasingly adopting virtual technology because of the many benefits it provides, including cost reduction, added business value, and optimal use of IT assets. Virtualization is a strategic answer to server sprawl, low resource utilization, management control and security concerns. While virtualization is key to consolidating servers and improving manageability, it still relies on capacity and performance management in order to be effective. In this session, you will discover the performance analysis and capacity planning processes involved in moving to virtualized environments as well as the processes involved with ongoing performance and capacity management of the virtualized environment.
DCM13: Virtualization’s Missing Link: Data Center Automation
Joe Wagner, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Novell, Inc.
Virtualization technologies allow companies to meet new business needs and say goodbye to underutilized hardware platforms, server sprawl and spiraling IT costs. However, as virtualization adoption grows, questions still remain. In a virtualized environment, everyday data center tasks, like scheduling jobs, automating load balancing, and accurately tracking assets, require more sophisticated management tools. How can data center managers confidently manage day-to-day tasks with virtualization's added complexity? This is where virtualization's missing link, data center automation, comes into play. Virtualization is not a new story. The technology is here and the benefits are already proving to be fruitful. However, these benefits – reductions in server sprawl, heating and cooling costs, power consumption, etc. – are only possible if effective management tools are in place. This session will discuss how organizations can create an agile, policy-based environment to automate and orchestrate virtual machine lifecycle management. Without proper management, companies only have a piece of the virtualization puzzle.
DCM14: How to Effectively Plan and Manage Large-Scale Virtualization
Andrew Hillier, CTO, CiRBA, Inc.
Today many organizations are actively moving toward implementing virtualization on a large scale, but challenges still exist in its deployment. The inherent challenge is how to take these initiatives from the lab into complex production environments that are filled with constraints and considerations not found in labs. Organizations that look at virtualization as purely a sizing exercise have lost sight of critical factors that can determine the success or failure of their initiatives. This session reviews a methodical and data-driven approach to assessing and planning virtualization opportunities that is by far the best way to drive out risk. Learn how to analyze your virtualization project and how moving from the lab can become not only manageable but highly anticipated.
DCM16: IT Process Management: It’s Not Just Job Scheduling Anymore
Ralph Crosby, CTO, BMC Software
Automation technologies such as classic job scheduling and change management are well established within IT operations. What we are seeing today is the logical convergence of these various technologies to provide not only enhanced capabilities across the data center but to provide access to them by a wider range of users. This presentation discusses the nature of automation convergence and its relationship to other IT management processes and technologies like ITIL. Opportunities for convergence and the advantages of a centralized management model via a configuration management database are explored in detail.
DCM17: Data Center Automation
Dan Lamorena, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Symantec Corporation
Today's data centers can be described in a single word: Chaos! The increasing complexity of data centers has far outpaced the capacity and budgets of IT organizations to respond. With more sophisticated applications to support, challenging SLAs to meet and servers scaling up, out, and into the virtual, the writing's on the wall: automate or expect more of the same.
