SPARC Meeting - (S)un (P)rofessionals' (A)ssociation of (R)ichmond (C)omputer users
DATE: Thursday, May 4, 2006
TIME: 4:00 P.M. - 6:00 P.M.
MEETING SPONSOR - ***Sun Microsystems***

REFRESHMENTS, NETWORKING, and VALUABLE INFORMATION!

May's Topic: **Understanding Disk IO**

Disk IO is often the bottleneck that is slowing down your application and your business. The ability to properly tune disk IO requires an understanding of multiple factors, none of which have anything to do with the raw speed (MBps) provided by the vendor. We will discuss the various factors involved with disk IO and enable you to analyze, predict and plan your own disk IO. We will provide you with a tool for calculating the impact of changes in your IO subsystem and for holding vendors accountable to a specific performance expectation.

Presentation highlights will include:

*Transfer Size*: Transfer Size is the factor that has the most impact on disk IO. We will explain what transfer size is, how it works and how it can be improved.

*Striping a Stripe*: Many people have a back-end stripe, such as several RAID-5 LUNs on a Sun SAN. To further improve performance and increase the size of a mountpoint people choose to use the OS DiskSuite or Veritas to stripe these LUNs into one large filesystem. There are very specific formulas that should be followed when setting up a single stripe. Incorrect stripe sizes are a common reason that people do not maximize their IO potential. This problem grows exponentially worse when you "stripe the stripe". We will discuss the proper method for calculating your best stripe size and how to calculate the stripe size for nested stripes.

*IO Performance Calculator*: A spreadsheet that we will give you to demonstrate the differences between different disk configurations and the impact of certain changes, such as the number of disks, the quality of disks, etc. The spreadsheet also contains a column with precoded formulas so you can plug and play with the numbers for your environment to predict the impacts of changes and make the right decisions to meet your performance goals. Finally the spreadsheet contains the logic/code behind each of the formulas that factor into disk IO performance.

Our speaker, Charles Pfeiffer is a Senior Technology Consultant based in Richmond, Virginia. Charles manages his own consulting business offering support to about 20 different customers world-wide at any single point in time. Charles' primary areas of focus are UNIX and Oracle. Charles specializes in performance diagnostics. In the past year Charles has solved several performance problems in UNIX, Oracle and Disk IO resulting in improvements between 300% and 1500%. In a recent disk IO tuning adventure here in Richmond, Charles was able to take a system from 20 MBps throughput to 240 MBps throughput without buying any additional hardware. Before starting his own business in 2004, Charles was a consultant in Virginia for 8 years working with various customers on UNIX and Oracle projects. Charles is currently beginning a new book on Enterprise System Performance Analysis and Tuning for Osborne.

Your attendance is important. Don't forget our "Loyalty Program" for 2006. Be sure to be their and have your attendance recorded for prizes and gifts at the end of the year. Bring an associate, too. Just RSVP, below.

LOCATION: Genworth Financial in Building 4 (old 6630 West Broad St.) on the sixth floor (Genworth U). Genworth Financial is located on West Broad Street in the Brookfield Office Park. After turning at the light on Broad Street and entering the Brookfield Complex...you should stay in the left lane and turn left at the stop sign. Follow the road around past the Sheraton to Building 4 toward the back of the campus. Turn left for Visitor Parking. Additional parking is located on the far side of the building as well. Please enter at the front main entrance.

For directions to 6630 West Broad St. go to the following URL:
http://maps.yahoo.com/py/ddResults.py?Pyt=Tmap&tarname=&tardesc=&tarhash =&taraddr=6630+West+Broad+St&tarcsz=Richmond,+VA+23230-1702&newtcountry=us&newcountry=us&doit=1

RSVP: Please send an email RSVP at RSVP@RichmondSparc.org. You can also RSVP via the web site. We need to have a list of attendees for the Security Guards at Genworth. THANKS!

For additional information about the Richmond SPARC Users Group, please visit http://www.RichmondSparc.org/. We hope to see you there!