SPARC Meeting - (S)un (P)rofessionals' (A)ssociation of (R)ichmond (C)omputer users
DATE: Thursday, February 21st, 2008
TIME: 4:00 P.M. - 6:00 P.M.

MEETING SPONSOR - ***Sun Microsystems***

REFRESHMENTS, DOOR PRIZES, NETWORKING, and VALUABLE INFORMATION!

February's Topic: Sun's StorageTek Technology

Have you ever suspected an application was experiencing an I/O bottleneck but found the standard OS tool set, uh, lacking in the ability to quickly analyze all the data it captures? Hate working with spreadsheets and charts? Have you ever wondered how your application would behave on the latest whiz-bang storage platform from Sun? Ever wanted to know at what point your storage was likely to "throw in the towel" when load increases?

You're not alone, and Sun has some tools to help.

Sun's StorageTek[tm] Workload Analysis Tool is a host-based, storage-centric Java application for Solaris and Windows which captures data regarding storage performance and displays it for real-time and historical analysis.

Sun's StorageTek[tm] Vdbench is an extensive I/O workload generator written in Java, used for storage benchmarking and storage performance tuning on Windows, Solaris, Linux, AIX and HP/UX. It provides both a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a Command Line Interface (CLI).

These tools will be presented in detail and demonstrated for our next session by Henk Vandenbergh.

Henk is a software developer for Sun Microsystems who has 36 years of experience in 'making the computer do the dumb work,' creating tools so computer users and administrators can use their time and energy on the real job: problem solving.

Henk spent 16 years with StorageTek and has been with Sun 8 years where he concentrates on storage performance workload generation and performance measurement tools. He is the sole architect and developer of Sun's Vdbench and Swat tools, and he wrote the Storage Performance Council's SPC-1 and SPC-2 workload generators. [http://www.storageperformance.org/]

LOCATION: Genworth Financial in Building 4 (old 6630 West Broad St.) on the sixth floor (Boundaryless Room).  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&a mp;newtcountry=us&newcountry=us&doit=1

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

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