Software Asset Management: It's a Science Howard Amoils (Isogon International)
	How does IT evaluation really takes place? - A case study examining the socio-technical riddles of evaluating UNIX capacity alternatives Raoul Blignaut (Nedcor Bank - South Africa)
	Giving the Business Units What They Want - End User SLA's Andy Blowers (Candle Corporation)
	The Storage Investment - Maximising Your Company's Return John Brennan (Digital Storage P/L)
	SAN User Experiences in a Multi-Vendor Environment Joint presenters: Howard Charles (Suncorp-Metway) Mike Le Voi (Hitachi Data Systems)
	IT Outsourcing in the New Millineum Sara Cullen (Deloitte Touche Tomatsu)
	Using a Balanced Scorecard for Outsourcing Success Sara Cullen(Deloitte Touche Tomatsu)
	Cost-Effective and Practical IT Business Continuity Management (BCM) Andrew Darby (Resume IT)
	Is Your Organisation Ready for SAN? Oscar Ernst (QANTAS)
	Advanced Fibre Channel and SAN Phil Gann (Hitachi Data Systems)
	E-intelligence - Creating knowledge from the click Bill Gibson (SAS Institue Australia)
	SMP for Idiots Shane Ginnane (Ginnane Computer Consultants)
	Sizing Development Environments. Programmer Productivity and the Economic Value of Rapid Response Time Brian Grindley (Capacity Performance Services, UK)
	If you haven't got a plan - you can't go wrong Brian Grindley (Capacity Performance Services, UK)
	Introduction to Storage Area Networks Bruce Howarth (University of Technology, Sydney)
	Expanding Your IT Service Vision Ian Jones (Australian Bureau of Statistics)
	Monitoring HFS Performance with DFSMS 1.5 Clark L Kidd (Landmark Systems)
	Infrastructure Project Management Kim Ko (IBM GSA)
	Basic Fibre Channel and SAN Mike Le Voi (Hitachi Data Systems)
	Effective Gathering and Analysis of NT/2000 Performance Data Craig Linn (University of Western Sydney, Nepean)
	Planning the Relocation of Your IT Department: A Case Study Pierre Louys (State Rail of NSW)
	Securing against Hackers - UNIX: A Practical Guide Jacqui Lynch (Circle4 Consultants)
	Reducing the Batch Window to Start Euro Processing or Pulling the EMU's Head out of the Sand Neil McMenemy (McMenemy Consultants Limited)
	Smoke and Remote Mirrors Neil McMenemy (McMenemy Consultants Limited)
	Application Programming Monitoring: Back to Basics John Mycroft (Mycroft Systems)
	Ibuprofen, Nurofen or (Project) Management Huy Nguyen (Teton Consulting)
	Workload Manager and CICS: New Options and New Insights Steve Samson (Candle Corporation, USA)
	Practical SAN's Andrew Tippett (Storage Technology)
	Balanced Scorecard for IT Performance Management Brian Watts (SAS Institute Asia Pacific)

The increasing cost of software is creating huge problems for IT Managers. At a time when organisations have to reduce costs and increase efficiencies in an attempt to remain competitive, huge increases in the price of software are forcing cutbacks in other areas of IT. Software vendors are not addressing this growing cost for their customers at all.

The biggest problem with addressing this growing cost is the lack of information on actual usage of the software, what does the software contract say and how can I prove what I am saying.

With Software Asset Management (SAM) it is possible to address this large cost and provided you have the necessary tools and information you can negotiate savings in your software costs in the short and long term future.

Effective SAM requires access to 3 areas Physical Usage of Software, Contractual and Financial Information. Come and learn how to integrate these essential ingredients to maximise your results.

This case study examines the evaluation of UNIX (RS/6000, SUN, HP) infrastructure capacity alternatives within a large financial institution The focus of this paper is to examine what really takes place 'behind the scenes' during the assessment and evaluation of UNIX capacity alternatives. The case will review the technical objectives but will concentrate on understanding the socio-political dynamics which are present in all organisational situations. During the course of the case study it was discovered that there were two, distinguishable and separate evaluations taking place one formal and the other informal. By attending this session you will be better able to identify and understand the dynamics and implications of more than just the technical / capacity aspects of a typical IT evaluation.

With the advent of e-systems, IT can no longer get away with the vertical silo views of Application Service. Business Units look at systems as seen by the end users. Systems Management must achieve the same view. This will allow IT to manage the e-systems from end-to-end, in a way that matchs the end user point of view.

With storage fast becoming the most significant cost in an IT budget, the focus is shifting towards the business case i.e. how does an organisation leverage the storage investment and maximise return. We examine how technical and business objectives must meet in order to satisfy the overall goals of the organisation. In particular, we look at the key considerations including:

• The Total Cost of Ownership Approach (TCO)
• How to protect and "future proof" your storage investment
• Eliminating the "hidden" storage management costs
• Increase Productivity to Decrease Costs
• How to measure your savings and benefits

SANs are a hot topic this year. Everyone wants to build one but few people have achieved one to date. This paper focuses on one user's experiences on building a SAN over the last 18 months. Suncorp-Metway were a very early adopter of the technology. They saw the need to rationalise their storage environment and to achieve economies of scale. Their SAN has been achieved with a few teething troubles experienced along the way. Nevertheless, the results have been impressive. They have managed to integrate OS/390, HP-UX and Windows NT in a multi-vendor, multi-location environment, both for disk and tape. This paper discusses user experiences, how to avoid the pitfalls and what to expect when your "SAN Box" is up and running.

Melbourne and Oxford University and Deloitte have recently completed landmark research into outsourcing for the year 2000 surveying 235 IT managers of public and private sector organisations in Australia.

Over 90% of Australian organisations are outsourcing to some degree. spending $8 billion per annum. It is here to stay and all IT professional must understand this important phenomenon. This session will provide you with the results of the 2000 research and trends since 1994. It will cover what is being outsourced and insourced, the driving reasons for and against outsourcing and and the outcomes. It is not to be missed.

Performance measurement of commerical outsourcing arrangements has evolved from measuring primarily service delivey to measuring a number of key "partnering" drivers such as service quality, finance, relationship values and value add. The Balanced Scorecard provides the "dashboard" to setting the expectations of both parties and measuring the acheivement of those expectations. It transcends both the contract and service level agreement to combine the high subjective expectations with the monetary and service outcomes. This session will guide you through the process of developing an outsourcing Balance Scorecard in context of different forms of outsourcing and "partnering" arrangements. It is the new way to select the best service provider and to ensure long term success is achieved.

We all know of the need to have contingency plans in place in the event of a catastrophe striking our business - but how do we ensure that we don't over-invest in the provision of backup resources? A recent survey in Queensland found that only 57% of companies actually have plans in place to effectively manage a crisis. Why do businesses continue to ignore the problem? Could it be the lack of understanding of how to measure the right amount of investment required, and where to make the most cost-effective and practical use of such an investment? Do companies prefer to ignore the problem because the start-up costs are assumed to be prohibitive?

The speaker will show how to make the most appropriate decisions to maximise your protection whilst keeping your investment to a minimum. The process discussed will expand upon the methodology recommended in the AS/NZS 4360:1999 Risk Management Standard and show how cost-effective plans can be achieved. This session will be of practical use to all management and executive staff as well as those responsible for developing BCM strategies within the organisation.

The implementation of SANs (Storage Area Networks) in medium and large corporations that are running two or more different platforms presents enormous technical, strategic, organisational, political and cultural issues. It is up to vendors to provide solutions for the technical problems but it is up to the users to find answers for all of the other issues.

Considering that not all companies are the same, Storage Managers evaluating a SAN implementation should expect little or no help from vendors and/or external consultants when trying to evolve from the traditional "management by platform" model to the "management by function" model required by SAN.

This paper will try to identify most of these issues and suggest different approaches to tackle the problem.

The session is a follow-on from "Basic Fibre Channel and SAN". It goes into more detail about arbitrated loops, AL-PA, LIPs and other hub based phenomena. In addition, switch and bridge configurations will be examined along with tuning and performance options. The presentation will conclude with a detailed question and answer session in which you can ask the assembled experts questions about SAN possibilities and configurations.

E-intelligence enables businesses to customise web relationships, optimise profitability by accurately predicting web behaviours, provide the tools to efficiently run web and mobile business operations, and to deliver that information to all relevant points of contact, whether people or additional processes. E-intelligence creates knowledge from all e-based data - whether business to consumer, business to business, business to supplier or a company's own internal e-based systems systems and integrates it with existing information.

SMP has a long and varied history. Only the developers could honestly describe it as “long and honourable”. There are some of us that remember the days of stage 1 & 2 sysgens; then came SMP4 then SMP/E. Various packaging solutions have also come, and in some cases gone – IPO, PDO, Custompac and the latest and greatest, ServerPac. Guaranteed to work – IBM set it up, IPL it, dump it to tape, and ship it to you with a handy little installer.

What could be better:

• any idiot can sell it
• any idiot can see the benefits and order it
• any idiot can install it
• any idiot can package thirdparty software to suit.

Brian Grindley
Capacity Planning Services Ltd.

This paper will demonstrate the techniques used by the author to size development environments and will discuss work to refine the algorithms used.

The cost of getting the sizing effort wrong is usually apparent in cases of overconfiguration, but where sites are underconfigured it is difficult to say what the cost is to the organisation. Brian will discuss how it may be possible to put an economic value on the cost of underconfiguration.

On a recent assignment the storage planning team had a good track record of predicting the size of the disk farm. Acquisition policy was based on (and policed by) the forecasts in the plan. Teams requiring storage beyond their allotted amount had to request more in time consuming methods (often unseemly arguments) which occasionally involved senior management. Much time and effort was expended on preparing and policing an accurate disk storage capacity plan.

Further investigation revealed a different picture. The apparently accurate forecast was in fact a mixture of an artefact of the process, good planning and sheer good luck. A bit of lateral thinking produced in house practices that were much simpler to operate. Using processes akin to the ERP activities well understood in other areas of the business, we were able to offer a better service to the organisation at a much reduced cost to the planning department. This paper will present the case study to explain the method used and speculate upon its relevance to CPU planning.

Storage Area Networks (SANs) may be the Next Big Thing. This presentation will identify the business and technological drivers behind SANs and associated products such as Network Attached Storage (NAS), and will attempt to describe the current state of development in the field. Several products are available, and several groups are developing standards for aspects of SAN operation. I will try to show how these are related.

In many organisations, SAS Institute's ITSV has been used to address the enterprise's needs for comprehensive warehousing and reporting on IT infrastructure performance. Following convention, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) purchased ITSV primarily to provide reporting on its complex IT infrastructure including data network and servers. Fundamentally, ITSV is a transactional-based data warehousing and reporting system, offering tailored solutions to capacity planners. Detailed analysis of ITSV architecture will show that administrators are armed with the ability to provide data warehousing services to non-conventional clientele including helpdesk management, cost recovery management and project managers. In this paper, the author reviews the fundamentals of ITSV, and how the system's flexibility allows administrators to expand their services. As a member of the ABS Network Management team, the author provides a case study of his experiences in expanding ITSV's portfolio to the benefit of the ABS.

Each new release of OS/390 seems to feature more components that rely on functions provided by UNIX System Services. Thus, the proper tuning of OS/390 UNIX is becoming a critical and non-trivial component of overall OS/390 performance. The heart of the OS/390 UNIX file system is the HFS (Hierarchical File System), and many OS/390 performance problems can be traced to poor decisions related to HFS data sets. The good news is that DFSMS 1.5 vastly improved HFS performance, and added some new controls for tuning these important data sets. The bad news is that most of these new controls have not been well documented and explained. This session will attempt to correct that oversight by explaining basic HFS concepts, exploring the new controls added by DFSMS 1.5, and providing some practical suggestions for improving HFS performance.

Often underrated and misunderstood, Project Management and Project Management Culture can contribute significantly to an IT organisation in financial and management terms. In this paper, the author shall discuss the concepts of project management, what it really means to have a project management culture, Consultancy Vs Project Management, Deliverable Vs Delivery, Pitfalls, Value Adds, etc., from a practical viewpoint within the infrastructure environment.

Do you dream about ports, hubs, switches and bridges? Do you know what the difference between an F-port and an FL-Port is? Do Classes of Service leave you wanting more? For the answer to this and other intriguing questions, come along to an introduction to the world of Fibre Channel and SAN. This technical presentation will bring you up to speed on this emerging technology. The current buzzwords will be explained and examples shown of how the technology is being used today.

Mike Le Voi will present a discussion of matters relating to generating sound and music on the PC. This will include MIDI, sound and a few gems of information on tuning up Windows operating systems for the benefit of a CD writer. MIDI using the MCI interface, the Windows Multimedia API and also the DirectX 7 API will be demonstrated.

The various inconsistencies of 95, 98, NT and 2000 will all be examined as well as the possibilities for producing good quality music using only software synthesizers and a standard sound card. There will also be a short examination of the DirectSound API and a demonstration of comparative sound quality using WAV, MP3 and WMA technologies.

Mike Le Voi has been a MIDI and sound programmer and recording technician for several years as a hobby. Check out his web site for further information. (Switch on your sound card and speakers as you explore the site).

http://www.modemss.brisnet.org.au/~mlevoi

NT 4.0 and its successor, Windows 2000, can provide a vast and rich array of system wide and application/service specific performance data. In the first half of this paper we examine: what performance data is available; where it is obtained from; and the variety of means available to access it, from low level API programming to very user friendly point and click GUI displays. In the second half we examine how you can analyse this data once you have it, and how best to go about integrating the data gathering and analysis phases. The above is couched within the context of commonly available tools, some provided with NT/2000 itself as standard, and others freely available on the Net.

State Rail of NSW is aiming at relocating a number of its business units from various locations in Sydney CBD and consolidating them into three (3) buildings (Central, Xerox house, and CityRail Centre). As part of the project, the IT division (IT Infrastructure) has been given the task to:

• decommission, relocate and commission Information Technology and Telecommunications (IT&T) infrastructure at CityRail Centre, Xerox, and Central buildings
• perform the migration of workforce computer equipment for an estimated 1,300 staff.

This session covers security concepts for UNIX. In particular, it goes over some of the legal issues, covers the tools hackers use, the documents they use and how to secure your system against them. It also includes information on what to do when you are broken into. The intent of the session is not to teach attendees how to be hackers, but rather to give examples of how systems can be secured against them. The focus of the second half will be on UNIX. This material will be presented in two, back-to-back sessions.

Some have said that batch tuning is a dying trade, there are other, new, exiting technologies that Capacity and Performance analysts should be dealing with. Why then is it still necessary?

Although batch tuning techniques are certainly 'mature' there are now many reasons why the batch window has to be squeezed. Businesses want their on-line systems available earlier in the morning and later at night, continuity of business / disaster recovery backups may be eating into the critical path, business growth may be excessively high or perhaps the batch processing was not well designed in the first place.

This paper documents a case study where a major international corporate bank had to reduce the end-of-year batch window '…by at least four hours' to allow Euro conversion processing to take place over 'le weekend'.

Capacity Planning and Performance Management use a wide range of techniques. To the uninitiated some of these methods can appear to be a 'black art' employing 'smoke and mirrors'. This paper shows how a variety of techniques, from simple to complex, helped a site predict accurately the effect that employing a Remote Mirroring technique for Continuity of Business had on its batch window.

In building bigger, better and faster mainframe platforms, we often lose sight of why it's all there - to deliver applications data to the end users. In this presentation, we'll look at some of the basics of application program monitoring and tuning as well as re-visiting some of the old "rules of thumb" We will look at what the applications programmer can do to help improve performance and how the performance specialist can help the applications programmer.

So you got stuck with it too? But do you really know what it's all about? Have you gone through the PMS yet? It might give you a few headaches, but it can save you time and money.

This article shows you some easy steps to get into it and how you can really be serious about it. Be one of them.

Long live Project Management.

Since the announcement of Workload Manager (WLM) in 1994, the interaction between CICS and WLM goal mode has been a frequent matter for concern. Many who implement goal mode see the complexity of the CICS interface and the difficulty of exploiting response time goals; they give up and stay on velocity goals with no intent to change.

On May 16, 2000, IBM announced a series of new facilities to be available in the September 2000 time frame to overcome some objections to goal mode. Some optional changes to the way CICS operates in goal mode are among those new facilities.

This paper presents the new facilities as they apply to CICS as well as a new and less disruptive approach to goal mode migration and exploitation for CICS.