IT Workload Automation Blog

Are expensive scheduling agents preventing you from meeting you Job Scheduling requirements?

Replacing or even acquiring additional legacy scheduling agents is a costly, daunting and resource-draining task. Vendor-independent technology enables you to avoid these risks while streamlining, optimizing and modernizing your Job Scheduling environment without replacing a single agent. Not to mention you can add agents to meet your growing requirements at the fraction of the cost of purchasing additional agents from existing scheduling vendor. All of which significantly reduces cost and increases your return on investment.

Are you throwing money away with legacy scheduler agents?

Costs can increase because your scheduling vendor bases agent cost on multiple CPUs. With technology-independent technology, whether it's one CPU or 20, the cost remains the same. You are not locked down by a particular vendor, platform or scheduling system. You gain value and additional functionality at a reasonable price that is not offered by Job Scheduling vendors.

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We were pleased to host customers and prospects at the EMP Museum in Seattle last week. It was very cool because after lunch at the EMP Lounge we had exclusive access to the museum.

The Sky Church screen is the largest HD screen, measuring in at 30 ft x 66 ft. It is 3 stories tall. The event took place on the 3rd floor private balcony overlooking the entire screen. It was incredible!

Here are a few pictures we took from this lunch and learn. Make sure to visit http://www.stonebranch.com/news/events/ for upcoming Stonebranch event information.

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About a year ago now, we announced that Opswise Automation Center is, in fact, the first Workload Automation broker to be fully enabled for cloud deployment.

Today, Automation Center can be centrally deployed in the cloud and control resources in the cloud and also back in your data center. Alternatively, you can keep Automation Center deployed on-premise, and connect to resources in the cloud.

We also took it one step further - dynamic registry of newly provisioned servers into Automation Center - and newly registered agents are automatically assigned to work queues for immediate allocation of workload.

It's a significant step forward from what is considered possible. Why was it so easy for us to achieve?

• As a solution designed and architected within the past 12 months, we follow the web and architecuture standards of today
• 100% Web-based. No thick client, no socket to reconfigure, no ODBC driver to fiddle with. Just pop up your browser, and presto, instant access
• Our agents were designed to auto-register to begin with. Extending smart agents is much easier than dumb ones
• Adherence to modern security standards - fully support for SSL end-to-end ensured our message security played nice on the web, and now, in the cloud!
• A desire to innovate & consistent communication with our clients, many of which, are cutting edge, rapidly growing 21st century data centers

The result? Opswise in the cloud. While the cloud may not be for everyone today, we are seeing more and more examples of how enterprises can leverage workload in the cloud. And we're there - today.

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We're hitting the road for a series of seminars in Europe next month.

We'd love to see you there. Simply click the link for the seminar that's most convenient for you to register and learn more information.

For current Stonebranch event information at any time, visit http://www.stonebranch.com/news/events/.

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A primary objective of Business Service Management is to give business stakeholders a window into how closely an enterprises application infrastructure and underlying data processing is mapped to the contracted service levels for a business service.

Much of what goes on in the enterprise these days is automated, and a high percentage of that information will be found within your Workload Automation environment. A modern workload automation broker is able to effectively manage real-time/near real-time workload as well as batch.

Nowadays, the Workload Automation Broker can do a lot more than just launch scheduled batch jobs. While often dismissed as simply another IT management tool, Workload Automation Brokers in fact drive over 70% of all business processes today, which are performed in batch.** It can identify and monitor the interdependencies of data and processes between the systems, applications, and business processes that comprise a business service - giving you an unprecedented view into your enterprise.

While there is certainly a goldmine of information that your scheduler can provide you about your environment, significant advancements in workload automation are being introduced by new and existing vendors that may soon make you question how your existing solution is a barrier to or an enabler of you achieving compliance of business service levels.

Technology Background

Since the 1970's, Enterprise Job Schedulers have automated and managed increasingly complex data centers. Starting out on mainframes, they evolved into distributed systems and are now moving into the cloud.

In the past decade, these tools have evolved far beyond batch with added integrations to SOA, ERP systems, and other packaged applications to become workflow-centric, event-driven tools with significant SLA management capabilities The Job Schedulers became Workload Automation Brokers.

The emergence of virtual systems and cloud computing has created an explosion in the number of computing resources requiring management and has created another level of complexity in the enterprise. The role of automation in enabling business services to meet service levels has never been greater.

Today's Workload Automation Brokers continues to expand it's already significant role in the management of online workload as they are increasingly utilized to manage processes relying on technologies such as parallel processing, ETL, and GRID computing; and they are creating complex workflows that span operating systems, data sources, applications, and even physical data centers. This enables IT Operations Managers to present to the business a means of mapping IT resources to business processes.

Workload Automation's future as a protector of Service Levels

How can Workload Automation solutions be advanced to improve the overall performance of business services? What should you be looking for from your workload automation vendor?

In terms of BSM, here is a list of five things to expect out of Workload Automation today and in the near-term to enable you to achieve your automation and BSM goals. If this isn't offered by, or on your provider's near-term roadmap, it should raise some eyebrows.

1. Predictive Analytics

Solutions need to move beyond simple SLA Management or single workflow critical path analysis and into true Deadline Scheduling. Predictive analysis enables enterprises to visualize all interdependent tasks and analyze real-time results on the fly against historical records.

By doing so, the enterprise can identify key business processes and create a backward chain of events to identify processing bottlenecks.

2. Proactive Resource Optimization

Working in conjunction with Predictive Analytics, solutions need to automatically release bottlenecks using information about resources, business priorities, dependencies, and deadlines that prevent the completion of key business processes and create policies for reallocating enterprise resources to meet the necessary time windows to remain with service level.

The more portable and transparent workload is, the more it is able to fully leverage the different kinds of resource optimization opportunities that may be present in your enterprise.

Resource optimization may take many shapes:

-Prioritizing workload on a server, including delaying or cancelling less critical workload
-Allocating more physical resources such as CPU, Memory, or DB connections
-Provisioning new virtual servers from a pool of VM machines or in public and private clouds
-Re-engineering applications, especially data intensive applications, to take advantage of load balancing and GRID technologies.

3. Reviewing and Refining Job Definitions
The old adage, "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" is a smart policy in most situation. In Workload Automation, it could end up costing you a bundle. Your old job definitions probably reflect hardware and software limitations that have long since been lifted. If you take a look, you'll likely discover that many processes that once had to run sequentially can now run in parallel.

It is important to challenge the assumptions as to why your workload is configured and defined the way it is, and to eliminate processing bottlenecks caused by obsolete limitations.

4. Visualization

As important as it is to have a corporate-wide BSM dashboard, and valuable that the workload automation solution to provide meaningful data for that system, it is also important that within the Workload Automation solution that there is a business-centric view mapping to the status of each business service as a stand-alone entity as well as in relation to one another.

5. Reporting & Auditing

More critical than reporting on failures in the workload that could jeopardize meeting performance targets is getting to the heart of why workload fails to meet their service levels.

It's critical that from a central management point that you can identify failures and trends. You also need a comprehensive audit trail that can identify problems caused by human error and improper changes.

Conclusion

Your legacy job scheduling and modern workload automation solutions can provide you a rich set of relevant data as to the status of your mission-critical workload and how it maps to the business.

Leveraging this capability is a combination of understanding how your business services are mapped within your workload automation solution, leveraging a modern workload solution that will enable you to more effectively manage your service levels, and an intelligent review and challenge of the assumptions relating to how your workload has been historically scheduled and configured.

**Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling, 2009 by Gartner Group

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As the new Transformers movie hit the theatres this past summer, we were reminded about the "transformation" we have seen take place over the last twenty-plus years with regards to job scheduling and data center automation. Job scheduling has truly transformed itself from a mediocre looking auto"mobile", into a powerful, conquering, efficient, workload automation machine.

What began as a simple task-oriented system to "batch" workload processes together and initiate them at a date/time when the online systems were down and the processing could take place, has now become a tool that must allow for processing at any time, based on random business transactions done over an internet-enabled device from anywhere in the world.

It's really funny to see the various stages of workload transformation that companies are in today. The Next Generation Data Center are all about processing customer data immediately and eliminating the restrictions and limitations still in place in some long-term IT shops. Some of these restrictions are necessary and a result of not being able to take the business risk replacing the outdated systems. But, some of them are simply still in place, because "that's the way we've always done it". When talking to a data center manager a few months back, I asked him if they ever thought of processing a randomly arriving transaction as soon as they received it. He was taken aback, "Oh No, we would never process any unexpected file that arrived", he told me. As our discussion about "business-initiated" workload automation continued, and I shared with him the advances in the technology that were enabled largely from the product architecture, he looked at me and said, "You know what, I bet our customers would love it if we could process their transactions immediately!" Sometimes all you need is a little insight, an open mind, and transformation can occur.

Then other times, you might need a technology change as well! Many of the more widely installed workload automation solutions are based on the initial method of "batch processing", and some have only recently added the ability for ftp file and dataset monitoring at creation time. Still others have found themselves "retro-fitting" more immediate triggering mechanisms to their batch scheduling products, and charging you for the additional components they create. But, few have really been able to tap into the reality of "business-events" initiating workload processing at very granular trigger conditions. Even then, conditions must be set and in many cases VSAM files must be scanned to determine if any activity is ready to be processed. The overhead of this activity on a system that was not designed for this could be cost-prohibitive from a simple resource perspective. You have to think about the cost of those resources being consumed. So, what is a data center to do for their new business, which is really driving their company growth and profits, while still supporting the "legacy" workload processing which is more batch-driven? Does it really have to be a total 'rip and replace' of one system for another, in a 'big bang' conversion? Not necessarily. It definitely reduces the risk by doing a big bang conversion, but without 'reengineering' the workload to take advantage of the newer automation benefits, you are not gaining the most value from the new technology. In short, you are not getting what you paid for. Yeah, I know, some companies want to minimize the risk and opt to push the "reengineering" phase off to a later date (that NEVER happens, by the way). I would advise companies to think of the process as "reenergizing" versus re-engineering, and it actually serves to provide dual benefits of a better processing method for the business data, but it also better educates and helps your production control or automation personnel to embrace the newer methods, rather than them trying to get the newer product to allow them to work the same way as the product you are replacing!! I have seen this scenario play out many times, and while the "big bang" converted customers get over to the new product quickly, in the specified timeframe, they are often left feeling remorse because they never get to optimize the workload implementation to take advantage of the products capabilities. As new releases with even newer functionality are delivered, they just find themselves getting further and further behind.

Transformation is a process, and doesn't happen overnight, or as quickly as shown in the movies either. But we often heard that "anything that is worthwhile doing, is worth taking the time to do right"! Updating your mission-critical workload processing to business-initiated methods could be vital to remaining competitive in your market, providing better service to your customers, and increasing shareholder value for your company. Start with the workload that needs the transformation the most, and work your way thru the process, you will end up with a much better solution,and a more knowledgeable and more automation-focused staff, once the journey is complete. Having taken both paths, converting big bang, and transforming by re-energizing and taking advantage of the tools capabilities, I would choose the latter, every time. You simply leave too many of the benefits of converting in the first place, lying on the table.

Transformers, now that is a movie I would see again!

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It's not too late to register for one of our Fall in Love with Opswise Automation Center v5.1 Valentine's Day webinars tomorrow.

We have one scheduled for 10am EST and another scheduled for 2pm EST.

Are you ready to fall in love with Opswise Automation Center v5.1? Register now for this special Valentine's Day webinar and see what all the fuss is about.

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Workload Automation today is primarily focused on automating workload in mainframe and distributed environments that are of a batch or near real-time nature. While this form of workload will continue to remain prevalent in the data center for years to come, there are new forms of workload, made possible by new shifts in enterprise architecture that are emerging in parallel and will necessitate the integration of both existing and new platforms.

To more greatly concentrate computing power to reduce overall run time, applications have taken to greater balancing of workload to shorting data processing windows. Parallel processing emerged, and was later refined by Grid computing. Data centers now had greater capability of executing workload within their existing infrastructure, but could not optimize hardware resources. This led to large numbers of servers under utilized the vast majority of the time and on standby for peak operating periods.

The on-demand nature of virtualization technology and cloud computing changes that - though the vast majority of job scheduling and workload automation solutions deployed in the enterprise cannot leverage it.

Today, Opswise helps you move forward to Workload Nirvana by providing a set of core services that moves the bar in what is achievable by a Job Scheduler and Workload Automation Broker

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