UniForum will sponsor and produce a pair of MOSES Conferences this spring. The Massive Open Systems Environment Standard (MOSES) was adopted by a small group of end-user companies that met to discuss common operational management issues they faced in their evolving UNIX-based relational database environments.
This group of companies, now comprised of Burlington Coat Factory, Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Millipore Corp., Oracle Corp., Sequent Computer Corp., US West NewVector Corp., and British Telecom, formed a user group called MOSES and began to issue a series of Whitepapers that address various topics of concern to their own operations which, they felt, could serve as guides to others facing similar systems management problems.
These Whitepapers, in turn, served as the foundation for a series of workshops given over two days last March at UniForum '94 in San Francisco. The workshops were extremely successful, drawing more than 160 attendees. The upshot of this success was the determination by UniForum and the sponsoring MOSES companies to revise and update the materials and prepare a new conference aimed at an audience of IT professionals and users who are responsible for the operational services in large data center environments. Attendees will be drawn from those with job titles including database/system administrators, technical consultants and analysts, MIS specialists/managers, and systems integrators.
The lead-off MOSES Conference will be given on the Sunday and Monday, Mar. 12 and 13, before the start of UniForum '95, at the Dallas Convention Center. The second session is slated to be held in early May at the Word Trade Center in Boston. Registration information for each conference will be made available shortly, with mailings going to all UniForum members.
The MOSES Conference Program will be led by representatives from each of the MOSES companies, who in turn will invite two or three vendor representatives to join them on panels that will address specific data center administration problems. The goal of each panel session will be to investigate a real-world systems problem, with detailed analysis of the context of the problem and the impact the problem can have on operations, and then present solutions that have been shown to work in the field. The expectation is that conference attendees will leave each session with tangible results that can be taken home and applied.
The Conference Program has been set and will include sessions on Backup and Recovery, Change Management, Disaster Planning and Recovery, Data Archiving, Event Monitoring and Alarms, Job Scheduling, and Security Controls. In addition to these specific sessions there will also be a Best Practices Showcase and an Exhibitors Showcase, where attendees can see the latest applications and tools available for data center management.
Some of the Conference Program instructors have been announced. They include Mike Prince and Gerry Claggett from Burlington Coat Factory, Donna Fleury from Fujitsu, Ron Hawkins from Millipore, Matthew Yearling from Oracle, Michelle Trout from Sequent, and Bill Holt, Shannon Oleson, and Steve Starck from US West NewVector. These instructors have years of experience managing the data centers in their own companies and have been through the process of identifying problems and structuring systems solutions that work in their operational environments.
In researching this conference, UniForum Conference Manager Deborah Bonnin surveyed a number of attendees from the first MOSES Conference. Among the many comments she heard was a recurring theme that people wanted to go and see for themselves what really works. "The opportunity to listen to experts who had grappled with and successfully designed large systems was the chief reason they attended," she says. "A second reason that they found compelling was to gauge where standardization efforts had taken the industry with regard to data center management and how these standards could be made to work in their own shops." In support of this need to apply industry standards, each MOSES conference attendee will receive free the collected MOSES Whitepapers, which UniForum is publishing this month. These papers serve as de facto standards for the various areas of data center management that the conferences will address.
To get on the mailing list for complete MOSES Conference Information, send e-mail to Deborah Bonnin at debbieb@uniforum.org or fax to (408) 986-1645.