Getting the job done

Computerworld - Some people might smirk at the thought of calling job schedulers some of today's hottest systems tools. But the new breed of multiplatform, XML-enabled, event-driven job scheduling tools represents several leaps forward from the old-fashioned IT workhorses of the mainframe era.

Take a look at some of the organizations using them:

Narex Inc. in Golden, Colo., is using Tidal Software Inc.'s SysAdmiral job scheduler to automate and halve the time it takes to process credit reports.

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections in Madison used Argent Software Inc.'s Argent Job Scheduler to run jobs just 20 minutes after installing the software.

In Dallas, BMC Software Inc.'s Control-M job scheduler has let the city's data center trim a round-the-clock staff of 48 to a mostly daytime staff of 28.

"After decades of being viewed as drab mainframe tools, job schedulers have become sexy," says Patrick Dryden, an analyst at Meta Group Inc.'s Houston office.

Job schedulers were designed as simple job launchers first for mainframes, then for Unix systems. A master command would direct multiple agents to run reports, update databases and perform similar tasks at set times.

Over the years, enterprise programmers have written job scheduling policies with interdependencies. One policy might state that Job 2 (running reports) shouldn't start until Job 1 (updating a database) has run successfully. And that was about as complicated as they got.

Today, the report may run on OS/ 390, the database on Unix, and data changes may flow from Windows NT servers of Web-based applications.

What to Look For When selecting from the more than 50 job schedulers on the market, consider the following: The ability to integrate with your applications Cross-platform coverage Scalability The ability to handle complex dependencies across platforms The ability to replace or inte-grate with legacy job schedulers The ability to simulate activities or processes Ease of use Fail-over capacity Source: Gartner Inc. report, "Job Schedulers: Old Dogs Must Learn New Tricks," by Milind Govekar

With businesses running globally around the clock, a credit card company's request for a report on a delinquent account can come into Narex at 2 a.m. as easily as at noon, says Paul Konkel, IT director at Narex.

In the old, time-driven model, Narex's systems could be set to automatically begin such jobs. But monitoring and restarting failed jobs was a manual process.