While companies cope with increasing demands for speed from their customers, shareholders and customers alike demand that they make these changes cheaply, with minimal risk and with as few people resources as possible. Is there any way to meet these challenges? Take another look at modern enterprise job scheduling to see how it enables the real-time environment (RTE).
White Paper
Event-Driven
Automation
Get Real, Right Now
Denise P. KalmWorkload AutomationOctober 2006An RTE needs an RTI (real-time infrastructure), a way ofExecutive Summary managing the varied applications, platforms and systemsBusinesses are challenged by an increasingly competitive, from the perspective of business workloads. Theseglobal economy. The late 20th Century, marked by night- workloads must be able to seamlessly share a pool oftime batch windows and business decisions timeframes of resources. Data must be readily accessible and flow easilydays has been replaced by a need to have data and and dynamically between applications.answers in minutes, if not seconds. The key principles underlying an RTI are:So where does enterprise job scheduling play in thisworld? Your workhorse scheduling solution may have . Unified architecture that is automated and managed as aserved you well once, but today, you need real event- whole, with minimal manual intervention.driven automation integrated with calendar-based Standardization on a platform type might be ideal, butscheduling. Your solution has to be broad and tall - broad unrealistic; thus, the management software must enableto cover the infrastructure, applications and platforms - you to manage the architecture as a whole, even if theand tall enough to scale. components are disparate.. Adoption of open standards that port to any platform.While companies cope with increasing demands for speed Examples are Linux, Web Services, Java, XML - all able tofrom their customers, shareholders and customers alike run on any hardware, supporting your business anddemand that they make these changes cheaply, with scalability needs.minimal risk and with as few people resources as possible. . Event-driven automation, which means the ability toautomatically trigger jobs and processes from eventsIs there any way to meet these challenges? Take another that occur in real time. Scheduled, calendar-basedlook at modern enterprise job scheduling to see how it processing will coexist with event-based schedulingenables the real-time environment (RTE). (calendar triggers are events, after all), ideally with acommon solution.. Business process automation, which means the ability toThe Real-Time World link disparate applications together into new workloads,Competitive advantage, customer demand, and at the as required, facilitating and expediting data sharing andcore, the viability of your company depends on achieving a new functionality across the enterprise.real-time enterprise. Businesses need to enable access to . Autonomic server management - Self-healing systemsinformation as soon as it changes, but more importantly, will find and correct errors automatically, with no manualbe able to act on it quickly. Though some data changes intervention. Self-optimizing systems recognize businessmay require the intervention and assessment of a priorities, establish service level agreements (SLAs) anddecision-maker, many can be automated, reducing the process flows, and can allocate and re-allocate resourcestime and resource costs. to those workloads to optimize performance.
Identifying real-time processes in the real world is easy;leading edge businesses rely on instantaneous creditapproval, ticket booking, order fulfillment and more to Enterprise Workload Automation attract and retain customers. But underlying thesuccessful real-time environment (RTE) must be a flexible What is it? Why do you need it? Simply put, Enterpriseinfrastructure capable of supporting real time, zero Workload Automation is the next generation of joblatency demands. The old "silo" server management schedulers. But it is more than just a modernized GUIapproach will not work; management by platform or by strapped onto an old architecture. True workloadbusiness ownership is a recipe for failure. And yet, the automation solutions must be architected to trigger workmajority of companies have acquired a complex, multi- on "events." An event can be a calendar-based, date-timeserver environment, whether through merger, acquisition trigger, a change in a file, or the appearance of a messageor simply purchasing best-of-breed at the time. This on a message queue. It can also be a resource usage levelenvironment is not likely to change; the investment in or a Web Services request. When you have the need tohardware is simply too great. But the strategy in how you trigger work based on something happening i... [download for more]
