FLORUG flies performance flag in fifth conference

Meeting goes beyond typical RUG event to become specific on speed

By Craig Solomon
IT Consulting Consortium

Every February I am torn. Do I stay at home and enjoy a lovely Valentine’s Day with my wife, or do I wing my way to warm and sunny Florida and join about 100 other HP professionals at the FLORUG performance conference? Well, since this article covers my trip to FLORUG, I think this year’s answer is obvious. Sorry, dear.

Over the years I have attended many HP Regional User Group conferences, from MARUG on the east coast to ORERUG in the west, but the FLORUG conference (www.florug.net) keeps drawing me back. Maybe it is the sunshine in February, or maybe it is the embarrassing pictures I get to capture and hold hostage (you know who you are, and I am waiting for your payments). Or maybe it is that the FLORUG conference has gone beyond a typical RUG conference and has stood out as the only HP performance-specific conference.

This year the FLORUG conference was held at the truly beautiful Marriott Hutchinson Island Resort, located on Hutchinson Island just north of West Palm Beach.

I would love to use the NewsWire as my venue to write about my fun trip to Florida on Delta Airlines, regaling everyone with tales of a truck ramming our plane and ripping a nice hole in it, leading to flight cancellations and excessively long lines that redefine queue wait. But rather then bore you with those details I will save that story for my stand-up routine — I mean, my tutorials at this year’s HP World.

Mike Onoffrey, owner of Strategic Memory Solutions and a sponsor of the FLORUG conference, had this to say regarding the venue: “Over 100 HP professionals from all over North America descended on West Palm Beach. Many of us left sub-zero wind-chill temperatures to arrive for a week in the sun with warm ocean breezes that never dipped beneath 70 degrees.”

One of the highlights of attending this conference is the annual FLORUG golf tournament. This year at the Champions Golf Club Randy Williams led his team of Bruce Naylor, Pete Randall, and T.J. Tryon to victory with an embarrassing one under par 71.

Now before the rumor starts that the FLORUG conference is just an excuse to have fun in the sun, let me dispel that myth, and assure you there was substance to this conference as well.

Since I am only one person, I could not attend every session. I concentrated my efforts on those surrounding the e3000. I would, however, be remiss in not giving a plug to the devout followers of HP’s Unix guru Bill Hassell. His sessions and one-on-one meetings were packed to the gills as usual.

Not to be outdone by the Unix followers, Mike Onoffrey led the MPE sessions with a loud chorus of “MPE Rules!” which left the HP-UX gang with nowhere to go but to return a chorus of “HP-UX Rules!” Onoffrey said he was “just about to lead the MPE troops into the verbal trenches with ‘HP-UX sucks,’ ” but cooler heads prevailed and the technical sessions started.

The first session that I attended was not a session in the strictest sense. The FLORUG committee was kind enough to pipe in the HP e3000 Webcast with the help of Donna Page, an e3000 rep for HP’s Southeast Region. The Webcast was led by e3000 advocate George Stachnik and was well attended. I can personally say the highlight of the Webcast was none other than Adager founder and IMAGE guru Alfredo Rego, who voiced his puzzlement via telephone about why Adager was not listed on one of the Webcast slides as an N-Class pre-release tester.

Bradmark founder and chairman Brad Tashenberg presented the second session I attended. I have always had a great deal of admiration for Tashenberg, and his talk on IMAGE Performance did not disappoint. He brought us back to our roots by reminding everyone in attendance of the history and internals of IMAGE and file management. He further gave us useful tips and techniques for maintaining good IMAGE performance.

With no other MPE-specific sessions scheduled, I spent the rest of the day in the conference’s vendor area. I was surprised to see two companies which only recently entered the world of the e3000. I hope this shows the e3000 is still a viable direction for new and growing companies.

I chatted with Karmin McKay, Channel Development Manager, and Scott O’Neill, Director of Marketing for Software Innovations (www.softinn.com). Software Innovations is a Norway-based company developing and supplying business software solutions. “The HP e3000 has been neglected,” said McKay. “We feel the HP e3000 is a solid system. We decided to port our products to the e3000 last fall.” Software Innovations is so committed to the e3000 that they have formed partnerships with both Hewlett-Packard and North American distributor Client Systems.

My next stop in the world of recent additions to the e3000 community was SMA, a Texas-based company providing enterprise-wide automation solutions to corporations worldwide. I spoke with Sales Manager Cheryl Whiteley, who is no stranger to the wonderful world of the e3000. In the past Cheryl was employed with companies such as Bradmark and M.B. Foster Associates.

“It was a pleasure to attend the meeting,” Whiteley said about her experience with this year’s FLORUG conference. “The venue, subject matter and attendance this year were up to their usual high standard.”

Andrew Herbert, Vice President of Lund Performance Solutions said this about the FLORUG conference: “This is an event we look forward to presenting at and attending each year. The Florida Regional User’s Group folks along with Strategic Memory Solutions provide great hospitality, and there is always plenty of vital information exchanged at the sessions. I particularly enjoyed a session that Steve Cole of Outer Banks Solutions presented.”

On Thursday I was duly impressed with Cole’s presentation. The talks from Outer Banks Solutions’ (www.outerbankssolutions.com) have always been both professional and informative, and this time was no exception. Cole used the analogy of plumbing and pipes to convey the flow of information through an MPE system. Cole took us through every aspect of e3000 performance and stressed that no matter how fast the system, the weakest link is always the disk and disk IO. Cole gave us solid advice for improving performance including these tips:

• Ensure system has adequate memory — this reduces page-faults and disk IO rates.

• Minimize disk fragmentation, which reduces system overhead.

• Maintain a minimum of 20 percent disk free space, with reduces disk fragmentation.

• Ensure the system is properly tuned.

• Don’t overload channels or the system bus.

• Ensure adequate CPU – balancing online users versus batch users.

Prior to his talk on “Living with 400 IOs per Second,” I was able to chat with Neil Armstrong, Senior Programmer at Robelle Technical Solutions. Armstrong joined Robelle in 1992, and two years later moved to R&D and became the programmer responsible for the Suprtool suite of products.

“I am truly busier now then I have been in months,” Armstrong said regarding the impact of the new systems on the e3000. “There is significant growth in the e3000 community, and I am very enthusiastic about the future.”

Robelle was one of the early testers of the N-Class systems. I asked Armstrong about these tests. “In mid-2000 I was invited to HP CSY to do initial testing on a new N-Class Server, along with two other third-party software vendors,” he said. “Once we were selected, I researched the N-class architecture by reading the N-Class white paper written in April, 1999 when the HP 9000 N-Class servers were released. Testing began well enough with the restoring of our test suite and running of some initial tests. Then problems began with the disk drives that were in the system, and we saw full SCSI bus resets for every disk in the disk array. It was slightly frustrating, because at times we saw tremendous IO rates followed by no IO when the SCSI bus reset.

“A few months later in December, 2000 we were invited back for more certification testing. This time, without SCSI resets, I was able to run my standard Suprtool test suite as well as do some huge extracts and sorts on a sample Amisys database. Giving me this kind of access to my own N-Class Server with 2Gb of memory and over 200Gb of disk was like leaving an entire Grade Two class alone in a candy store,” said Armstrong. “While doing the first huge tests of extracting over 5Gb of data from a dataset, I ran Glance/iX and watched the IO rates and I was amazed to see them exceed 400 per second. The initial results were very impressive.” Armstrong’s presentation is available for download in PDF format on the Robelle Web site, www.robelle.com.

When the technical talks wrapped up it was back to fun and frolicking at FLORUG. The extracurricular highlight of the show for me was the luau sponsored by Hewlett-Packard. When asked about the luau, Onoffrey had this to say: “It’s hard to top a luau, which is why we have one each year on Thursday evening. We decided to roast a pig and have a hula-hoop contest this year, which fortunately followed heavy rum-runner consumption. Then to top off our evening FLORUG Chairman Paul LeBlanc and I handed out the golf prizes, which consisted of gifts of everything from skillfully-earned stereos and Web TVs to well-deserved crotch hooks and pink golf balls.”

Friday’s events included a Performance Roundtable, but due to a pressing schedule I had to pass. But there’s always next year, and the 2002 FLORUG conference will be in Orlando, Feb. 9-17. “My thought is about making this a family week at the Magic Kingdom,” said Onoffrey. “We’ll be selecting the resort soon once we can decide which one we think everyone will like best, i.e. close to the theme parks, pool, bar, etc. Saturday, Sunday and Monday are for Disney World, Epcot Center, Universal Studios, and Busch Gardens during the day and warm, relaxing evenings by the pool at night.”

When I wondered if there will still be time for some technical talks, Onoffrey’s comment was “Send your brood off to the theme parks on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as you attend what will be the most aggressive technical performance program we have yet offered. We are already working on numerous improvement ideas that attendees have shared with us.”

Well, my wife has always wanted to go to Epcot. And as you may or may not know, Oregon in February is not the sunshine capital of the US. The question, of course, is do I purchase one ticket or two? Regardless of what I decide, you can be assured that I will be in Orlando Valentine’s week with a digital camera in one hand and a notepad in the other. I have doubt that the presentations will be interesting as well as informative. I am equally sure that the weather will be beautiful and the evening activities entertaining.

For more entertainment, feel free to visit our Web site and see more pictures from the FLORUG conference. These can be found at www.craigs.com/florug.htm, or just go to the events page and follow the “Photos from FLORUG” link.

Craig L. Solomon is the founder of the IT Consulting Consortium, and can be reached at craig@craigs.com or at his Web site, www.craigs.com.