There is one industry organization that understands that you don't have to be a trendy start-up to have the answers to questions that technology professionals face daily when trying to get the most of the computing capacity they have in-house. The Computer Measurement Group, a not-for-profit organization run by volunteers, this week will host its 33rd annual conference in San Diego and show organizer's say the gathering will tackle topics such as server consolidation, system virtualization, business service management and capacity planning.

The CMG, established during the heyday of the mainframe, works to solve the issues IT managers face daily through collaboration and training, according to Michael Salsburg, CMG director and board member who also works at Unisys.

"There is a lot of focus in our group on just how do you measure IT service quality across all the platforms. We cover how you measure, optimize and improve IT service quality," says Salsburg. "That is an age-old computing issue. And it is not just about servers. It covers network, storage and all the technologies needed to deliver business services."

The group expects up to 700 attendees at its conference this week, which features more than 150 papers on various techniques IT professionals can put to use in their own IT shops. For instance, during one presentation Adam Grummitt of Metron will share how IT professionals can get the right mix of utility computing, server consolidation and virtualization in their environments. The premise is that proven methods can be used in new scenarios to optimize capacity and performance in computing environments, Salsburg says.

"Ever since IBM mainframes have come out, people have been working to understand how to manage and optimize computing workloads on systems," he says.

"Understanding workloads, planning for capacity, modeling and forecasting - all of it has moved beyond just IBM mainframes to all systems and most of the techniques developed and algorithms that work are platform agnostic and can be applied to the pressing problems out there today."

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.