SPARC Meeting (S)un (P)rofessionals' (A)ssociation of (R)ichmond (C)omputer users

DATE: Thursday February 7, 2002

TIME: 4:00pm - 6:00pm

REFRESHMENTS, DOOR PRIZES, NETWORKING, and VALUABLE INFORMATION

Art Mafale, from the Glastonbury (CT) office of Strategic Technology, will be leading February's topic:

"Why is Performance and Load Testing Important?"

With IT budgets being strained, and management asking IT staff to do more with less, its even more critical today to make sure your proposed infrastructure can meet the demands to which it will be subjected. And it's increasingly important to load test your new systems prior to their introduction as production servers.

In this presentation, we will look at the following topics:

* Increase uptime and availability of mission-critical Internet systems

Load testing increases your uptime of your mission-critical systems by helping you spot bottlenecks in your systems under large user stress scenarios before they happen in a production environment.

* Measure and monitor performance of your e-business infrastructure

Watch your system handle (or not) the load of thousands of concurrent users hitting your site before you deploy and launch it for all the world to visit.

* Avoid project failures by predicting behavior under large user loads

It is a shame when so much effort is put into building a web project only to realize that it won't scale after it has been deployed. Avoid project failures due to not testing high-load scenarios.

* Protect IT investments by predicting scalability and performance

IT projects are expensive. The hardware, the staffing, the consultants, the bandwidth, and more add up quickly. Avoid wasting money on expensive IT resources and ensure that it will all scale with load testing.

Strategic's speaker will be Art Mafale, from their Glastonbury (CT) office. Art is responsible for designing methodologies and providing management oversight for the design, analysis, testing, and deployment of Strategic Technologies' Performance Management solutions for mission-critical, enterprise applications.

Art has been working in various aspects of the information technology field since 1987 and has acquired a strong engineering and business background enabling him to effectively analyze, communicate, and deliver high-end, strategic technology solutions. He is proficient in the areas of systems administration and multi-server network design and deployment and has obtained these skills through his previous Systems Engineer and Project Management roles.

Our speaker will also be available following the presentation to answer detailed product, or account specific questions that are not covered in the presentation.

Strategic Technologies will sponsor the February meeting. In addition to great refreshments, they have promised some exiting Door Prizes!

Be sure to be present for the our continuing Winter Series of Meetings. The Sun community in Richmond is growing, and you are an important part of it! We look forward to your participation in the User's Group and are confident that you will find it technically enriching.

LOCATION:

GE Financial Assurance, in the HQ building (6604 West Broad St) on the second floor in Conference Room 2C.

GE Financial Assurance 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 right lane and turn right at the stop sign.
Follow the road around to the four way stop intersection. At this stop diagonally to your right will be the 5-story GEFA HQ Building. Turn left for Visitor Parking. Additional parking is located behind the Headquarters Building as well.

For directions to 6604 West Broad St. go to the following URL:
http://maps.yahoo.com/py/ddResults.py?Pyt=Tmap&tarname=&tardesc=&tarhash=&taraddr=6604+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 now also RSVP via the web site also. We need to have a list of attendees for the Security Guards at GEFA.

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