Pre-conference Seminars

Speaker: Ken Moreau
Company: HP

This seminar surveys the virtualization technologies available in the industry today, including servers, storage, and networking. 

Server virtualization includes hard partitioning, soft (virtual) partitioning, micro-partitioning, and resource partitioning. Storage partitioning includes comparing host-based and storage-based RAID, a discussion of multi-pathing and redundant components across the entire path from the host to the disk, data management across storage tiering, storage virtualization inside a single cabinet and between cabinets, as well as shared file system virtualization. Network virtualization includes subnetting, a discussion of multi-pathing and redundant components, namespace management and address failover.

Attendees will learn the common functions of virtualization for the products available from all of the major vendors, discovering similarities and differences. The seminar will cover the common functions that all of the virtualization technologies perform and show similarities and differences on each platform. Moreau will place an emphasis on management of virtualization and compare it to managing non-virtualized environments. Finally, the seminar focuses on the business problems that can be solved by virtualization and how to match different technologies to specific business requirements.

Speaker: TBA
Company: Global Knowledge, Professional IT and Business Trainers

This how-to seminar is designed to introduce the IT Service Management (ITSM) process objectives, activities, relationships, benefits, and critical success factors needed to achieve ITIL success. We’ll explore ITSM and its contribution to demonstrable IT service value. This workshop will help you better understand what others have done to define, document, and obtain a return on investment from ITIL.

What You'll Learn

• Benefits of ITIL process implementation
• Best practices for ITIL success
• Critical factors that impact ITIL implementation
• How to attain operational excellence using ITIL
• Stages on the ITSM roadmap
• Metrics that indicate an effective core process
• Where to start planning your ITIL implementation

Who Should Attend: Senior IT and business executives, IT executives, process owners, process implementation team members, IT management and staff, project managers, and others interested in learning about IT service management or responsible for the successful implementation of ITIL processes.

Outline

• Introduction to ITSM

• ITIL History
• ITIL Description
• Value of ITSM to the Business
• Need-To-Know ITSM Concepts
• ITIL v2 versus v3

• ITIL Landscape

• Transforming IT - Linking IT to the Value Chain
• Translating ITIL Terms into Common English
• Mapping ITIL Processes to Business Objectives and Functions

• ITIL v3 Service Lifecycle Processes

• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement (CSI)

• Successful Process Establishment

• Debunking Popular ITIL Urban Legends
• Understanding Best Practices
• Process Planning and Implementation Concepts
• Setting the Stage for Successful Process Implementation
  

Speaker: Gary McCready
Company: JRI-America

This seminar is designed for the storage administrator who has already started managing their HP EVA environment but desires to use the various utilities that can make their EVA management more effective and productive. The seminar will also cover a variety of documented and undocumented tools and techniques, including what you may request from your HP support organization.

The course will include downloadable scripts and examples, and will also feature live demonstrations of selected techniques. Students are encouraged to share their EVA management techniques and experiences.

Content Outline:

Overview and review of EVA Management

• Why an EVA
• EVA Versus…
• Limitations and best practices

CommandView EVA usage and limitations

• Naming and documentation recommendations
• VDISK management
• Correct EVA sizing and tools

SSSU Script language and script files

• Basic SSSU usage and commands
• Changes with CommandView 6.0
• Scripting and comparing SSSU files
• Saving SSSU output in a database

SAN Switch management and monitoring

• SAN switch management basics
• Port and zone naming recommendations

Replications Solution Manager (RSM) introduction

• RSM GUI usage
• RSM Job command language and limitations
• RSM CLUI scripting
• RSM Host agent usage

Continuous Access (CA) usage

• CA review of operations
• CA monitoring
• Disaster recover and testing using CA
• CA Network issues

EVAPerf Usage

• How EVAPerf works
• Usage via Perfmon
• Usage via Excel
• Usage via TLViz
• Usage via MRTG

Monitoring your EVA with MRTG

• Basic MRTG usage
• Monitoring SAN Switch usage
• Monitoring and alerting on your WAN links

EVA Multipathing tools and techniques

• Mutlipathing options and examples using Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, AIX  and other operating systems
• Validation and monitoring of paths using utilities and scripts

Driver and Firmware updates

• Determining supported driver and firmware levels
• Methods of determining installed versions
• Methods of rolling out updates
• Documentation tips

HP EVA monitoring with ISEE

• Correct ISSE setup
• Associated tools
• Monitoring best practices
• Call logging recommendations with HP.
• Contract recommendations.

HP Tools and reports

• Installation reports
• Troubleshooting reports
• HPCC and San Visualizer
• Host-Based tools
• Contractual Services
• Case Studies, War Stories and Roundtable discussion

Objectives:

• Attendees will understand the full suite of tools available to them for EVA management
• Attendees will be able to script EVA management tasks using several utilities and languages
• Attendees will be able to better organize and document their San Environment through the use of naming conventions
• Attendees will be able to choose the best monitoring techniques for their SAN and EVA environment
• Attendees will gain valuable real-life management knowledge through the discussion of case studies.

Who Should Attend:
Attendees of this session may include SAN managers who are experienced using other SAN arrays, or managers who have started managing an HP EVA. Usually, this group is responsible for Storage Area Network Management. However, they may be systems administrators who provide storage support as part of their system administration duties.

Why Should People Attend?

1. This seminar will demonstrate the use of provided EVA tools for functions that might normally require the use of purchased third-party products.
2. The techniques in the seminar can be used to reduce the amount of time needed to both manage and monitor the EVA, and can reduce the amount of time needed to resolve issues.
3. This course will present materials that are collectively in no training manual or class, and will explain the correct situations in which to use each technique or tool.

Speaker: Laura Chappell
Company: Protocol Analysis Institute, LLC

Bring your laptop to pre-loaded with Wireshark to complete a series of hands-on lab exercises focused on troubleshooting network performance and securing network communications. During the troubleshooting portion of this course, attendees learn to gauge and interpret latency, packet loss, congestion, and configuration faults. During the security portion of this course, students examine network reconnaissance processes, insecure applications, a botnet infection, failed virus detection tool update, and more.

All students receive the new Laura’s Lab Kit v8 DVD that contains all the trace files needed for the course, voice-over-video courses, additional tools for analysis, and numerous course supplements.

Speakers: David Dale, Edgar St. Pierre, Blair Semple, Gary Zasman, Devin Hamilton
Company: Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)

As a vendor-neutral trade organization, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) works in conjunction with its members around the globe to make storage networking technologies understandable, simpler to implement, easier to manage, and recognized as a valued asset to business. The SNIA is dedicated to:

• Driving future storage industry standards
• Providing thought leadership and best practices
• Developing comprehensive educational offerings throughout the world

Content Outline:

• Benefits of networked storage: iSCSI and Fibre Channel SANs
• Classification: the cornerstone for compliance and cost-driven information management
• Server and storage virtualization with IP storage
• Data de-duplication: methods for achieving storage efficiency
• Data protection and disaster recovery with IP storage
• Introduction to storage security
• Best practices for long-term retention of digital information

Objectives:
SNIA is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership, and promotion of the understanding and adoption of networked storage. In support of this mission, we are offering a pre-conference seminar that will deliver knowledge-based, vendor-neutral education and information on networked storage and associated technologies.

This seminar will cover the key technology areas and issues facing storage professionals today, including: IP storage solutions, protecting your data, disaster recovery, data de-duplication, benefits of networked storage, storage security, information classification, and best practices for long-term retention.

Who Should Attend: This seminar is designed for attendees with responsibility for their company’s or their clients’ storage strategies, including:

• Senior Managers
• Senior IT Managers
• Storage Architects
• ISPs/ASPs
• Chief Information Officers
• Storage Specialists
• Operations Managers
• VARs/SIs
• MIS Managers
• Project Managers
• Internet Specialists
• Developers
  

Speaker: Jan Mark Holzer
Company: Red Hat

Over the past 20 months, virtualization in Linux has been on the front page of every IT publication and blog on the Internet. It has to change eventually everything in our datacenters and many IT organizations are looking at virtualization with Linux as one of their next major initiatives. Despite all of the hype, it is important to understand on how one can leverage virtualization in a datacenter and imperative to understand how it is installed, configured, deployed, and managed.

This seminar will provide an overview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora Core and its integrated virtualization technology (including future technologies currently under evaluation). It will cover how to install, configure, and manage it in an enterprise environment and how to leverage virtualization in datacenter deployments.

Content Outline:

• RHEL5/Virtualization (Xen) technical overview
• Architecture
• Hardware requirements
• Virtualization models supported in RHEL5
• Performance expectations and best practices
• Storage models
• HA considerations and capabilities
• Guest live migration, pause/resume, save/restore
• Future technologies such as KVM
• Hardware configurations
• VT/AMD-V platforms
• Typical configurations
• Virtualization/Xen release information/planning
• Installation on RHEL5 and Fedora Core
• Basic Configuration of Xen
• Daemon configuration, security, management interfaces
• Advanced Xen configuration
• Scheduler configuration, Virtual CPU configuration and assignment
• Memory configurations, I/O configurations
• Configuration for (live) migration of guests
• Installing Xen guest images
• Replicating guest images
• Configuring guests
• Memory/CPU, storage, networking
• Monitoring and management of a Xen environment
• Tools available for performance monitoring and troubleshooting
• Deployment thoughts and ideas leveraging virtualization
• Backups and restores of files on guest images
• Availability implications: minimizing the risks of having too many eggs in one basket and determining which guests/applications tend to create greater availability problems
• Security implications: maintaining appropriate isolation between guest images and being aware of any lack of isolation that occurs

Speaker:  Keith Parris
Company: HP

This seminar describes how to use OpenVMS Cluster technology to provide disaster tolerance for the IT operations of a business, where disaster tolerance is defined as the ability to continue operating, uninterrupted and without data loss, despite a disaster to the extent that it causes loss of an entire datacenter site.

World events have raised the awareness of many businesses about the increased risk of disasters and the need to put sufficient provisions in place ahead of time so that IT operations can survive a disaster and continue functioning.

This seminar is aimed at assisting those who are considering or planning to implement a disaster-tolerant OpenVMS cluster or those who have one in place and need to know more about operating and managing it. This material includes real-life examples based on years of experience from sites which have built and operated disaster-tolerant clusters in real-world situations.

Content Outline:

• Terminology: High Availability, Fault Tolerance, Disaster Recovery, and Disaster Tolerance
• Foundational Elements Required to Achieve Disaster Tolerance
• Multi-Site Clusters
• Inter-Site Links
• Management, Monitoring, and Control
• Quorum Schemes
• Data Replication, including Host-Based Volume Shadowing and Continuous Access

• System Management Techniques
• What to Do When a Disaster Occurs
• Long-Distance Considerations
• Real-Life Examples
• Business Continuity

Objectives:

• Learn the differences between high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and disaster tolerance
• Learn what basic foundational elements must be present in order to achieve disaster tolerance
• Learn how a disaster-tolerant OpenVMS Cluster is built and used, from the feasibility study stage through planning, design, implementation, and operation
• Learn how OpenVMS Clusters have survived real-life disasters
• Learn how disaster tolerance fits into the overall field of business continuity

Who Should Attend: Attendees of this session may include OpenVMS configuration architects and OpenVMS system managers (but might also include disaster recovery or business continuity experts who are responsible for a set of IT operations which include the use of the OpenVMS platform). Usually, this group is responsible for configuration planning as well as day-to-day operation of OpenVMS Cluster configurations; however, they may also perform future configuration design duties, consult with application developers on how best to take advantage of an OpenVMS Cluster configuration, and provide disaster recovery and business continuity expertise.

Why Should People Attend?

1. With 24x7 operations and the Internet, downtime is getting more and more expensive. This, coupled with increased risks due to conflicts and terrorism, mean businesses have a great deal to lose if a disaster strikes. Many insurance companies raised rates after 9/11, particularly in high-risk areas, and a solid disaster tolerance capability can save on insurance costs as well as reducing the risk of loss to the business in the event of a disaster.
2. Many customer sites are doing datacenter consolidation to fewer sites, but then setting up a disaster-tolerant configuration across the consolidated sites. Datacenter consolidation can lower facilities and personnel costs, but then it is important to mitigate the risk and exposure of having fewer sites by taking advantage of disaster tolerance to prevent disruption of business if one of the sites gets taken down from any of a variety of causes.
3. There exist no training manuals on this topic at present. One can learn by doing, but as some companies have found to their discomfort, making mistakes when a disaster occurs as a result of a lack of understanding or training can result in loss of valuable data and a large negative impact to the business as a result.

Speaker: Bill Highleyman, The Availability Digest
Level: Intermediate

Active/active systems achieve extreme availabilities (literally, seconds of downtime per year). This seminar explains why these systems can obtain such high availabilities and how such systems are built. Fundamental to active/active systems is the need to keep database copies in synchronization. The data-replication engines that perform this function are explored in detail with examples of available products. Active/active systems are compared to cluster technology. Several examples of successful active/active implementations currently in production are described.

Objectives: 

• Understand the availability theory behind active/active architectures
• Learn how to configure an active/active system
• Be aware of the additional advantages of active/active systems
• Understand the advantages of active/active systems over clusters
• Study current successful installations in production

Who Should Attend: System architects or IT management. Usually, this group is responsible for system availability and budgeting.

Why Should People Attend?

• Active/active systems can save enterprises significant expenses by virtually eliminating the costs of downtime
• With active/active systems, the workload to  back up large data sets and to use these backups to bring up a backup system is greatly reduced or eliminated
• There are no training manuals on this topic. It is much too new

Speaker: Glenn Goodrich, GoldenGate
Level: Intermediate

Unimpeded 24x7 access to real-time information is what today’s users of critical business systems have come to expect, placing tremendous pressure on the IT organization to put architectures and solutions in place to meet that need. This presentation provides an in-depth, practical look at high availability and performance scalability technology challenges for NonStop environments. Attendees will walk through three systematic views for high availability:

1. Active system states that are subject to performance, response time, and scalability/load balancing issues;
2. Unplanned outages caused by data-level or system-level failures; and
3. Planned or “scheduled” outages which are taken for any combination of application, database, and/or hardware upgrades, migrations, or maintenance activities.

The presenter will discuss ways to better understand and differentiate solutions for each of those three availability states, including synchronous vs. asynchronous replication and even options for conflict detection and resolution in dual-active implementations. Real-world customer best practices examples and product demonstrations will further illustrate this session.

Objectives:

• Understand and differentiate high availability solutions
• Better understanding of challenges and solutions for active/active implementations
• Architecting solutions that enable zero-downtime system migrations, file partitioning, and database migrations

Who Should Attend: Attendees of this session may include key individuals responsible for projects involving high availability solutions. Usually, this group is responsible for solutions for disaster tolerance, zero-downtime operations, business continuity; however, they may also perform data integration across other platforms.

Why Should People Attend?

• The cost of data loss or application downtime due to either planned or unplanned outages varies from thousands of dollars to millions of dollars per hour. Planning the best implementation solution can change your business uptime from a 99% to 99.999% which saves more than three days of unexpected unavailability.
• This seminar provides points of discussion among the attendees to share real-world challenges and practical solutions. The presentation includes customer testimonials and case studies that cannot be found in any manual.

Speaker: Thomas Burg and Steven Powell, comForte
Level: Beginner, Intermediate

After a selection process among all emulation vendors, HP chose MR-Win6530 as the new standard emulation delivered with the NonStop System Console. MR-Win6530 9.0 enables full 6530 connectivity and secure file transfers supporting both of the two standard encryption protocols, SSH and SSL.
 
Security features aside, the emulation has a wide array of usability features that make it a world-class emulation for NonStop terminal access. This seminar will introduce the emulation and explain both its basic as well as its advanced features.
 
This is a hands-on seminar and for that reason it is strongly suggested to bring your own laptop. Connectivity to a NonStop system will be provided via WLAN access; a demo-version of the emulator will be distributed for the workshop if you have not pre-installed it on your laptop.

Objectives:

• Understand basic concepts of the emulation – making it easier to do things in general
• Make use of the advanced features of the emualtion, thereby greatly enhancing productivity
• Tips and tricks

Who Should Attend: System administrators or developers

Why Should People Attend?

• Greatly enhance productivity by being more efficient with terminal commands
• Hands-on training beats reading manuals

Speaker: Lisa Partridge, XYPRO
Level: Intermediate

This seminar will guide attendees through the security requirements for PCI, SOX, HIPAA, SB1386, and more. The XYPRO’s Auditor’s Checklist is a format that easily finds and references a particular security requirement, shows how it specifically relates to the HP NonStop environment, and addresses it to the satisfaction of an auditor.

Objectives:

• For current XYGATE customers, this seminar serves as an inexpensive refresher course on security compliance regulations, HP NonStop security, and XYGATE software.
• For those who aren’t XYGATE users, this seminar serves as in inexpensive security educational session from the recognized third-party experts in HP NonStop security and compliance.
• If you are concerned about a particular regulation, this seminar will provide you with the tools to identify which aspects of those regulations apply to your HP NonStop environment and how to determine whether you are compliant.
• This seminar will address how the XYGATE Security Compliance Module and the XYGATE Merged Audit tool will work for you, save you time and effort, and help you achieve compliance.
• Valuable XYGATE training materials from which ongoing reference can be made will be provided for no extra charge at this condensed session. Meet other XYGATE users and establish security specific connections in the industry for valuable, ongoing information exchange.

Who Should Attend: Security administrators, systems managers/administrators, and internal auditors. Usually, this group is responsible for security configuration and compliance; however, they may also perform systems management duties and provide audit knowledge expertise.

Why Should People Attend:

• Knowledge is key and this seminar will provide knowledge about the areas that require attention and the solutions available to the HP NonStop server community.
• One would have to attend our much higher priced classes at XYPRO to receive such a training manual on this topic.
• Interaction with fellow attendees is more beneficial than independent study.

Company: HP Education Services

Company: HP Education Services

Company: HP Education Services

Company: HP Education Services

This seminar will introduce Eclipse and the HP NonStop Enterprise Plug-in for Eclipse (EPE) to attendees. Participants will get the chance to add code to supplied programs in C, pTAL, or COBOL, then compile and link edit them on a workstation using Eclipse and EPE, and transfer the executables to an Integrity NonStop for execution. The participants will be able to explore features of EPE such as the Debug and Release configurations.