Background job scheduling coming back to the fore

Job scheduling, not as in manufacturing production, but of batch compute tasks, is coming back from the mainframe era to assist today’s client/server-based manufacturing operations. It’s background stuff, but its value is in automatically running, overseeing and restoring key business and manufacturing applications and the rest. Although commonplace in big systems for the last 20 years, best estimates show up to 90% of modern IT infrastructures running without resilient packages. But recognition is growing, according to both consultants and software vendors. And it’s not just because of its ability to manage demand against resources, but its resilience against failure, ensuring successful operations through fallbacks, alerts and workflow. “Job scheduling is about ensuring availability and robustness. Not having it can cost tens of thousands of pounds to a business,” says Dave Thompson, UK managing director of French job scheduling firm Orsyp. Thompson says clients of his have saved big money in terms of downtime avoided through events like a server going down causing a job to fall over in the night, and pick lists, work-to lists, material allocations, JIT replenishment requirements and so forth stalled. The system simply takes appropriate action and escalates any issues to ensure restart. Greatest beneficiaries are firms that run considerable complex batch activity, including overnight unattended job runs. The value is not only that of run time efficiency, but of being able to define appropriate paths in the event of errors. But there’s more. Thompson says: “Unscheduled jobs, like web ordering, and how batches hit today’s systems in an uncontrolled fashion – they’re all interesting. There’s an expectation of ever more flexibility, but if you hit systems when they can least afford it, there will be an impact.” Jock Hunter, managing director of SBB, which sells the Austrian UC4 job scheduling software, agrees. “What we’re doing is helping companies that want to run as efficiently as possible to achieve that. Our systems take over where it’s simply too complex for human administrators to manage.” The alternative, he points out, is to run manually or to have the IT department spend time building and maintaining scripts to do it – and meet the expectations of the company’s users in terms of service levels. Both Orsyp and SBB report rapidly growing interest. Orsyp job scheduling software user Delphi’s IT manager Elsa Exbosito in Spain says it’s central to her operations based on Cincom ERP. “We run it every day. We have NT servers and VAX VMS servers and lots of applications for controlling the stocks, the manufacturing that run every night.” Without it, staff would be required round the clock to handle problems, and there would still be complexity issues. And Pat Leach, CIO for drug discovery company Inpharmatica, concurs: “It’s absolutely critical to what we do.” The alternative, he notes, is investing heavily in redundancy which is going to be costly and inefficient in terms of capacity and compute utilisation. Ruth Kirby, director with IT infrastructure services organisation Systar, agrees the emphasis is moving to more proactive incident management using the event correlation tools now being bundled into these suites. Systar’s own will also handle overnight batch run failures, automatically alerting engineers on call with an SMS message, logging to call centre, running automatic diagnostics, loading patches and software upgrades, etc – and monitoring engineer response and escalating if need be.