This IDC White Paper presents an overview of key concerns driving IT management and how they translate into needs that can be addressed through modern approaches to job scheduling and workload automation. The paper traces evolutionary trends in job scheduling software, which is growing from traditional batch job schedulers to cross-platform and event-driven capabilities. It also explores the role of job schedulers in providing automation capabilities.
W H I T E P AP E R T h e E v o l u t i o n o f J o b S c h e d u l i n g : C A' s Ap p r o a c h t o W o r k l o a d Au t o m a t i o n Sponsored by: CA Tim Grieser November 2007
I N T H I S W H I T E P AP E R moc. This IDC White Paper presents an overview of key concerns driving IT management cdi. and how they translate into needs that can be addressed through modern approaches ww to job scheduling and workload automation. The paper traces evolutionary trends in w job scheduling software, which is growing from traditional batch job schedulers to 510 cross-platform and event-driven capabilities. It also explores the role of job 4.53 schedulers in providing automation capabilities. 9.805. The White Paper examines CA's workload automation strategy, which is based on the F evolutionary development of CA's portfolio of job scheduling and management 002 software tools into a comprehensive workload automation solution. The objective of 8.2 CA Workload Automation is to help IT organizations optimize real-time performance 78.8 of complex business workloads across diverse IT infrastructures, including both 05. mainframes and distributed systems. Key capabilities include dynamic event-driven P control of production workloads based on event triggers and defined policies to AS achieve IT and business service objectives. U 10710 AM S I T U AT I O N O V E R V I E W ,m ahg K e y C o n c e r n s D r i v i n g I T M a n a g e m e n t nimarF IDC tracks key IT concerns on an ongoing basis through a combination of structured te surveys, end-user interviews, case studies, and other in-depth research. The following ertS key concerns were recently expressed by IT managers and professional staff: neep ! S Pressures to contain costs and achieve efficiencies. Controlling IT costs 5 : continues to be a key requirement for IT organizations. IT budgets have been sret under pressure for a number of years, with cost containment a principal rau objective. Operational costs are significantly related to the number of IT staff qda required to perform specific functions. Automation is key to containing or eH l reducing operational costs. abolG ! Need to align with the business and show business relevance. Increasingly, IT is viewed as a service provider to the business, providing and managing services that deliver and support key business processes and applications. Alignment includes such activities as relating infrastructure events to business service and end-user impact.
! Need to achieve service objectives for key workloads. Service objectives for key workloads must be achieved. Operational service levels such as transaction volumes, throughputs, and completion times must be compared with service objectives, with provisions for adjusting workload priorities and resource allocations to meet business requirements.
! Need to improve infrastructure utilization. IT is under pressure to improve the efficiency and ROI of the IT hardware and software assets deployed in the datacenter and throughout the organization. A critical responsibility is improving server utilization for mainframes as well as for distributed Unix, Linux, and Windows systems used for such functions as ERP applications, databases, transaction processing, and middleware.
! Need for workflow automation and process standardization. While automation continues to be a key strategy for improving IT efficiency, it is increasingly viewed as a means to ensure that required workflows and processes are executed correctly, according to standards set by the IT organization. Indeed, ensuring that standardized processes are executed correctly is a primary condition for satisfying a number of regulatory compliance requirements. E v o l v i n g R e q u i r e m e n t s f o r J o b a n d W o r k l o a d S c h e d u l i n g
Fundamentally, job scheduling software is used to manage the flow of work on systems. This category includes batch job schedulers and workload balancing software working at the system and application levels. Traditional job scheduling is based on managing the execution sequence of a set of batch jobs. Job exe... [download for more]
