Why Change Your Job Scheduler? Today s business environments demand event-driven, enterprise-wide job scheduling unsupportable by legacy tools.

Transcription

1 Why Change Your Job Scheduler? Today s business environments demand event-driven, enterprise-wide job scheduling unsupportable by legacy tools. Job scheduling tools are automation workhorses that enable organizations to schedule, monitor and manage batch workloads to ensure a company s thoroughbred transaction processing and other business applications are able to run. Yet, too often, organizations haven t evolved their use of job schedulers and service-oriented application architectures at the same pace. While the application infrastructure becomes ever more service-oriented, distributed and flexible, the job scheduling environment remains stuck in a 1990s paradigm: platform-dependent, highly customized, and both resource and manually intensive. As such, IT ends up not as a business-enabler but as an inhibitor a role with which no CIO wants to be associated.

2 What the modern IT operation needs is a highly automated, event-driven scheduler that works across the enterprise application architecture, continuously monitoring jobs and alerting upon failure to complete. This enterprise scheduler would align batch workloads with service levels and business priorities, and support increasingly new and different application types and platforms from a single point of control in a platform and technology-agnostic fashion. If you have an ineffective or older job scheduler, or a solution that is composed of multiple tools, then you re managing workload based on outdated concepts, and you re constraining your business because of limitations in the environment. You can t easily see everything and how it impacts the business; therefore, you can t react and respond appropriately, says Tony Morelli, global product manager for BMC Software. As a result, you re more than likely exposing your business to a higher degree of risk and, at the very least, costing the business a lot of money writing custom code or possibly integrating third-party tools into scheduling solutions. And you are still failing to get them to do what a modern workload automation solution inherently does. Job Scheduler as l Critical Business Enabler Selecting an enterprise scheduler isn t a trivial matter. According to one leading IT research firm, up to 70 percent of all business processes are run in batch. That s a lot of moving parts and more importantly, the other 30 percent that isn t batch is more than likely dependent upon, or a prerequisite for something that is, Morelli says. The goal of any CIO should be to get the most from all those moving parts, enabling IT to align with and support the business in a service-oriented fashion, while maintaining peak efficiency and promoting business agility. This means establishing a highly automated, scalable solution, accessible from a single point, which orchestrates workload elements from across all platform types, packaged business A workload automation tool will allow your operation to keep pace, grow and not hold the business back. Tony Morelli global product manager BMC Software applications, and the application infrastructure itself. With such a solution, you could administrate all aspects of your service-related workload, whether it be batch or real time, and regardless of where it runs platformwise or geographywise in a way that s resource-aware and manageable within the context of business policies and priorities, Morelli says. Think about it this way, he suggests: A modern workload automation solution lets you focus on whether a web store or other critical business is where it needs to be, rather than worrying about the 10,000 or 50,000 jobs that are required to run every day that make it available. Likewise, a good enterprise workload automation solution will easily scale in line with your application mix and business requirements. The enterprise scheduler you selected years ago to handle the 5,000 jobs then running daily in your mainframe environment should just as easily be able to handle the 100,000 or million jobs you re now running every day across a diverse enterprise that includes your mainframe, distributed systems and a host of applications. This includes a slew of workload elements from traditional batch, file transfers to schedulingintensive ERP s and interrelated, real time elements. A workload automation tool will allow your operation to keep pace, grow and not hold the business back, Morelli says. What s more, an enterprise workload automation tool can complement and enhance broader IT best-practice initiatives, such as the adoption of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) capabilities or the adoption of business service management (BSM) disciplines. An enterprise workload automation solution such as BMC s Control-M software can enable or enhance BSM implementations and further mature ITIL-related processes. By exposing and correlating the batch layer of a service, and predicatively analyzing the impact of exceptions and proposed changes, Control-M can help an organization better handle the change, release, availability, and service-level management components of the batch-related workload. These, of course, become increasingly important as companies strive to deliver high-quality services while containing operational costs. 2 l Time for a Rethink As much as IT executives understand the significance of enterprise scheduling in today s distributed, serviceoriented application environment the technology has been more than a decade in the making, after all the

3 idea of centralizing workload automation holistically still troubles some organizations. Many continue to rely on homegrown tools or platform-centric schedulers. One of the biggest challenges is that workload automation sees and touches so much that many different stakeholder groups own pieces of the pie, and they fear losing control, Morelli says. But what they have to understand is that this isn t about losing control. Rather, it s about gaining a tool that opens everything up for them but does so in a strong, secure environment. They may be playing in somebody else s sandbox, but nobody can hurt their workload. l Frankly, Time s a Wasting The reality is this: Without an enterprise scheduler, IT cannot be at its operational best. And if IT isn t operating optimally, then it s unable to support the agility so necessary in today s business climate. IT organizations must move beyond simple task-based scheduling to event-driven workload automation solutions capable of addressing the needs of the enterprise application architecture in its entirety, not system by system. Sticking with the tried-and-true, old-school methodologies can have a number of crippling effects on the IT operation, including elevated operational costs and increased workload complexity, business rigidity and risk. For example, maintaining distinct job schedulers for each system type means allocating not only system resources, but also staff and management resources to each silo. Typically, an environment that relies on platform-dependent schedulers requires budgeting for internal integration or third-party tools that will provide more advanced capabilities inherent to enterprise schedulers and automated workload tools. What s more, an organization may see rising audit/ compliance costs and service-level penalties as batch environments grow more complicated, and taskoriented job schedulers are unable to provide adequate insight and reporting. Tools that provide an enterprise view, but do so by 3 BMC Software gave us greater visibility into our overall schedules and tighter integration of our batch schedules across our mainframe and distributed systems. Virginia Carron IT manager J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. placing a master engine on a single platform, tend to compromise performance, flexibility, and, more importantly, availability, by introducing a single point of failure that ties your business to a specific platform even as you begin to experience growth in different areas. In addition, being trapped into the use of platformdependent job schedulers could mean eventual forced migrations as organizations seek out the latest features and can limit how if at all a company can exploit emerging technologies or leverage virtual resources. In other words, Morelli says, without appropriately automated, enterprise-scale workload management tools, organizations are forced to run based on operational and technological constraints rather than business priorities. How Workload Automation l Benefits the Business No doubt, the idea of converting from a simple, taskoriented job scheduler to an enterprise-class workload automation tool can be intimidating. But the benefits far outweigh any perceived difficulties or risks. Such was the lesson learned at J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., one of the largest transportation logistics companies in North America. J.B. Hunt recently embraced the idea of workload automation to control batch and enterprise applications across its mainframe and distributed environments. In doing so, the company ended its impasse over ensuring continuous IT service delivery improvement given the declining support and rising cost of maintaining legacy DB2 management tools. We kept putting off replacing our tools because there are always risks involved with a major switch of this magnitude, says Virginia Carron, IT manager at the Lowell, Ark.-based company. Now J.B. Hunt relies on BMC s Control-M workload automation software for an enterprise-wide view of a complex batch environment that spans mainframe and distributed servers and multiple operating systems, including z/os, Microsoft Windows and UNIX. Batch jobs run across this mixed environment for fleet management, warehouse operations, billing, payroll, HR, and other critical applications. Batch jobs also play a major role in moving operational data from critical systems into the company s data warehouse for realtime business intelligence on truck movements and deliveries. BMC Software gave us greater visibility into our overall schedules and tighter integration of our batch schedules across our mainframe and distributed

4 systems. We absolutely need this so that we can make sound business decisions and keep cargo moving, Carron says. Enterprise schedulers help companies reduce IT and business operations costs; improve business service quality and availability; reduce production workload disruption; speed recovery times; support business growth and agility with quicker service delivery; and minimize risks associated with errors and delays. These gains occur while batch window execution time and mean time to resolution for batch workload exceptions shrink helping companies meet SLAs, reduce overhead and more readily comply with regulatory and audit requirements. BMC customers, for example, report reducing full-time equivalent resources needed to support workload automation activities by 20 percent to 40 percent while reducing time-to-market and deployment costs for new applications by 30 percent or more. Rather than costing your business a significant amount of money, as do legacy job schedulers, an enterprise workload automation tool will deliver lower total cost of ownership. A single control point eliminates the need for multiple tools and decreases reliance on specially skilled, higher cost platform or application-specific resources. Broad workload element support not only simplifies workload and reduces development and deployment time for new applications but it also reduces points of failure; thus improving business continuity and reducing recovery times when exceptions do occur. In addition, by introducing an inherent serviceoriented approach at managing batch and batchrelated workloads, an effective workload automation solution increases potential for revenue by improving SLA compliance and making it possible to bring new applications to market faster to support the growth of your business. Of equal importance, they also enhance audit and compliance capabilities and reduce the overhead associated with related reporting. What You Need From an Enterprise Scheduler Once you ve made the decision to move from legacy platform-dependent job schedulers to modern enterprise workload automation, it s time to explore which tools best meet your needs. Here are five factors to consider: Enterprise view: Look for a tool that provides a way to manage all workload elements (batch or batch-related) even those elements associated with commercial applications and the underlying application infrastructure through a centralized control point. Platform and application support: An enterprise workload automation solution should provide robust, scalable support for common computing platforms, as well as integrated scheduling for database, enterprise resource planning and packaged applications. It should offer an agentless scheduling option that allows you to manage workload on machines and in the cloud. Advanced scheduling capabilities: Look for a tool that provides comprehensive support for all aspects of the production workload for scheduling (based on calendar date/time, events and policies, for example). It should integrate file transfers, database functions, real-time events such as Java/J2EE, Web services and message queues, as well as extend its functionality via open APIs to homegrown applications. Alignment with SLAs, policies and BSM: Look for a tool that lets you define and align scheduling policies with SLAs and business requirements. It should provide real-time monitoring and notification of potential business-impacting problems, and solutions that allow them to model complex what if business scenarios to understand the impact of changes on their service-related batch workload before those changes can affect your business. Companies with BSM initiatives should look for complementary scheduler technology; those that haven t yet embraced BSM should seek a workload automation solution that enables it. Resource optimization: Consider a tool that offers real-time optimization of physical and virtual resources and a robust, scalable architecture with 24/7 availability and support. The tool also should balance workloads to run on the best machine at the best time, which will help reduce workload complexity and shrink the execution window. 4

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