November 23, 2014

Performance Impact of an IO-Intensive Application
The bottleneck of an IO-intensive app is usually when the system flushes the dirty pages to disk, not during the journaling step. The throughput of flushing is limited by the device bandwidth. A typical 15K RPM could reach a bandwidth of 120MB/sec in the best case of sequential access, in case of random IO the actual bandwidth is even less. To better illustrate, assuming the system uses the default Redhat Linux flush policy of 30 seconds, and the application writes at a rate of 20 MB/sec. After 30 seconds, the system would have accumulated 600 MB of dirty data to flush to disk. In Linux, the flushing is done by the pdflush daemon.


Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms
The session covers various GC tuning techniques, in particular focusing on tuning large scale JVM deployments and showing how to optimally size a platform for enhanced memory consumption. It also presents Pivotal Application Fabric reference architecture where a comprehensive performance study was done. ... Emad Benjamin is Principal Technocrat and CTO Ambassador at VMware. Jamie O'Meara is a Platform Architect and software engineer for Pivotal.



Aligning ITSM with Business Objectives
This discussion will focus on the need for the Business to understand what IT can do for them, things like: enter new markets, create new services, provide new solutions or industry shifts. Then we will look at why IT and in particular the importance of the CIO to be embedded within the business and understand it’s business goals and objectives to ensure both “lights on” and “strategic direction incorporating innovation”. The ITIL Service Strategy book will be used as part of our guide. So come and hear how to start aligning IT service management with the Business objectives.


How to align talent management with business strategies
Through informed alignment of talent management strategy with business strategy, organisations can identify the capabilities that are really needed (thus providing a realistic business case for the development investment). Strengthening this business case raises another challenge: developing effective criteria for selecting the right candidates for development and thereby using available resources as effectively as possible to support the maximisation of potential. This effective long-term thinking can override short-term pressure from shareholders, who are often reluctant to invest in talent management.


Why Isn’t My Strategy Working? It’s Broken That’s Why
Declare “WHY” you are in business and then build a culture to support your “WHY.” Share it in a way that defines the experience your customers, staff and partners will have every time. ... After you have declared your “WHY” and everyone is busting with passion about the vision, the brand and being part of the culture, it is time to monetize that dream. Level II determines if customers, partners and investors will join you by saying yes. ... With Level II in place, everyone is clear about the strategy to monetize the “WHY,” and now the next step is to deploy the revenue strategy complete with a “True North,” a Revenue RoadMap and aligned metrics. Deployment must be both aligned to the “WHY” and the revenue strategy.


Microsoft Strategy Vice President Teper: 'Minecraft is a development tool'
"Minecraft is a development tool" Teper told attendees of the UBS Global Technology Conference in Sausalito, Calif., last week. "People build worlds out of it. If we can get eight-year-old girls and boys building worlds and getting inspired by creating content digitally, as they grow up they'll want to create in PowerPoint, or Visual Studio. And in addition to being one of the few gaming franchises that doesn't have to be freemium, Minecraft can actually charge money. It turns out it's a great business with lots of upside." The full transcript of Teper's remarks from November 19 is worth a read.


Six Steps for Developing a Governance Model for Strategic Portfolio Management (Part 1)
In today’s business environment, we have to make decisions quickly to take advantage of such things as market-moving news and events, client requirements, new technology and other factors. In order to do all of this, you need a streamlined, customized approach that works with, and not fights against, your culture and best interests. At the heart of all of this, controlling and driving this process forward is the Governance Model. That’s why I call it the engine room. Without it, portfolio management can’t happen in any structured, purposeful way. So, whether you’re just getting started in portfolio management, or you need to re-think your approach, the Governance Model is where you start.


360 Degree Embedded Analytics: Inside Apps, Inside Processes
These technologies will sit close to Business Intelligence (BI), data integration tools and online analytical processing (OLAP) services – plus we will also focus here on data mining and ‘extract, transform, load’ (ETL) functionalities. In terms of facilitating technologies, let us also remember that Hadoop serves as a central processing hub here where ‘analytics-ready’ data sets can be blended, refined, automatically-modeled and then automatically published directly to analytical databases (like HP Vertica for example) for deeper usage. If this is analytics embedded into the application, then what of analytics embedded into the business processes.


How to Improve Teamwork in Your Agile Team
Presenting this pyramid to the team could be the second exercise. Based on my experience, most of the team members will identify at least one problem from the pyramid. Visualizing this will make them think a bit about the status quo situation while realizing that much is required to be done in order to have a great team. I think one hour should be enough to familiarise the team with the pyramid and to answer all their questions. Since the base of the pyramid forms from an Absence of Trust, I will focus on an exercise for improving this specific aspect. My team tried this exercise some weeks ago. Clearly, we had problems in the team and lack of trust was one of them.


Conversation Patterns for Software Professionals.
Years of experience in the industry have shown us that the best way to get concrete and detailed knowledge from the business is to structure it. Structuring can be defined as organizing the acquired knowledge according to predetermined criteria, for example: functional requirements, non-functional requirements, domain-specific rules, architecture and implementation limitations. Such an ordered collection of information is a checklist for those who collect it and it helps them answer the following questions - What do I already know? What else do I need to know? What do I have to specify?



Quote for the day:

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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