The Computer Measurement Group Hosts Two Webcasts Featuring Presentations from this Year's Mullen Award Winners

Award-Winning Presentations on Data Visualization and Hypervisor Performance will be Broadcasted to the Computing Community in September

TURNERSVILLE, N.J., Sept. 3 -- The Computer Measurement Group (CMG), the Information Technology professionals responsible for planning, measuring and managing the performance of the world's largest IT infrastructures, announced today that it will hold two webcasts featuring presentations from this year's Mullen Award winners.

This year CMG awarded the Mullen Award to the following individuals:

-- Peg McMahon - Sprint / Nextel - For her paper titled, "Death to Dashboards: Alarming, Performance Management Based on Variance, System Prioritization and Other Thoughts on Data Visualization"

-- Dr. Michael Salsburg - Unisys - For his paper titled, "Beyond the Hypervisor Hype."

The J. William Mullen Award is given in memory of past CMG president Bill Mullen. This award recognizes his contributions to CMG and the profession of information technology. The award recipient is an individual who exhibits both technical excellence and an engaging presentation style.

The first webcast features Peg McMahon and her thought-provoking paper "Death to Dashboards." This will be held on September 19 at 1 p.m. EST.

Ms. McMahon will answer questions like -- When do you page the Sys Admin? When do you need to order new hardware? When does the light on the executive dashboard turn from yellow to red? Traditionally, these decisions are handled by setting thresholds -- picking some almost arbitrary number to use as an upper or lower limit. Thresholds might have worked well in the days of a handful of beloved systems. But for today's complex environments, thresholding is not only painful to manage but conceptually bankrupt. She will discuss the problems with thresholds and identify some practical alternatives as well as better ways than traffic lights to do data visualization.

Web access to Peg McMahon's webcast can be found at http://www.cmg.org/webcasts/

The second webcast features Dr. Michael Salsburg and his in-depth paper "Beyond the Hypervisor Hype." This will be held on September 26 at 1 p.m. EST.

Dr. Salsburg will provide a simple model of today's hypervisors and he will discuss a set of benchmarks that have been published by VMware and XenSource. In addition, Dr. Salsburg will talk about performance implications of the benchmark results as newly emerging virtualization enhancements which are appearing on processor vendor roadmaps. Finally, the impact of server virtualization on the role of capacity planning will also be discussed.

Web access to Dr. Salsburg's webcast can be found at http://www.cmg.org/webcasts/

"Ms. McMahon and Dr. Salsburg have been funded by the Mullen Foundation to present their topics at regional and international CMG meetings. This is the first time we will be using a webcast to reach the general computing industry. This is taking the spirit of the Mullen Award to a new level," says Dr. Jeff Buzen, Chairman of the Mullen Foundation.

"The information shared in these webcasts is timely and valuable to IT professionals in all fields who are charged with the measurement and management of IT resources in today's enterprises," said Cathy Nolan, president of The Computer Measurement Group. "These webcasts are one of many examples of CMG's commitment to share information and best practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis and forecasting."

This year's J. William Mullen award winners will be picked from the best papers/presentations at this year's annual CMG conference, being held December 7-12 in Las Vegas, NV at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel.

The Computer Measurement Group (www.cmg.org) is a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals committed to sharing information and practices focused on ensuring the efficiency and scalability of IT service delivery to the enterprise through measurement, quantitative analysis, and forecasting.

For more information on the conference, see the conference Web page at CMG'08 (http://www.cmg.org/PRNewswire18-Conference)

For conference registration, visit the CMG'08 Registration page (http://www.cmg.org/PRNewswire18-Register).