Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Cybermation, a Toronto, Ontario, company that has been writing batch job scheduling software for mainframes since 1982, recently announced a new version of its cross-platform job scheduling utility, called ESP Espresso, which was first introduced in 2001. With ESP Espresso Release 3, Cybermation has added mainframe-class failover capabilities to the product, which allows the scheduler to keep functioning properly even when the primary ESP Espresso server goes down.

ESP Espresso is an event-driven job scheduler for integrating, managing, and automating the execution of batch jobs or other activities, such as generating invoices, sending bulk e-mails, or performing nightly backups. The core component of the ESP Espresso server is written in Java and communicates with the various platform-specific "agents" in XML. The Microsoft Windows-based ESP Workstation allows administrators to create workflows by dragging and dropping icons on a screen, and uses JavaScript for higher degrees of customization, if desired. Cybermation bills ESP Espresso as the only object-oriented, platform-independent job scheduler on the market, capable of reducing configuration and maintenance efforts to a fraction of that required by other job schedulers on the market.

The utility shares a common architecture with its older mainframe-based sibling, ESP Workload Manager, as well as ESP Alchemist, a software change management application. All three utilities use the same software agents that deploy to the most common platforms. These agents allow the job schedulers to take control of the execution of jobs running on OS/400, OS/390, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, Linux, OpenVMS, and Windows NT/2000/XP servers. Cybermation also offers special agents for ERP applications from PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP.

ESP Espresso Release 3 has the type of features that Cybermation's mainframe customers have taken for granted for years. While the product's advanced object-oriented underpinning gave users of the first two releases the capability to automate their job scheduling and remove complexity from that process, this latest release of ESP Espresso marks a significant stage of the product's development, said Ray Nissan, Cybermation's founder and chief executive. "The first two releases, we wanted to get experienced in the market, get our feet wet," he said. "Release 3 is a major release, a major step forward."

One of the most exciting new features is a hot failover capability that allows the job scheduler to stay online even when the primary ESP Espresso server has gone down. This new asymmetric failover capability allows a secondary server to take over when the primary ESP Espresso server goes down, even if the secondary ESP Espresso is running on a different type of hardware operating system than the primary server. This gives companies greater flexibility in their disaster-preparedness plans, the company said.

Nissan said the failover capability in ESP Espresso Release 3 consumes less of a processor's resources and is easier to use than other job schedulers on the market. "Invariably, having the failover capability is a requirement to purchase the [job scheduler] software, but companies decide to turn it off because it's too expensive," he said. "And once you go to the shadow, it's a bit of a laborious process [to move back to the primary with other products]. With our software, it's just as easy to fail back to the primary as it was to fail over to the shadow."

ESP Espresso Release 3 also brings Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) support to the product. ESP Espresso is now able to send SNMP traps automatically when a server or an ESP Espresso Agent starts or shuts down. The feature can also be used to send SNMP traps when a job reaches a specific monitor state, Cybermation said.

This release also brings new reporting features to the product. Instead of dumping into a log file the information about the work that ESP Espresso has done, Release 3 has the capability to export historical information, to third-party reporting products such as Crystal Reports. This makes it easier for users to view information such as failure rates or the location of bottlenecks to enable more effective capacity planning, Nissan said.

Lastly, ESP Espresso Release 3 features more powerful logical resource allocation capabilities that allow users to more accurately assign the proper amount of processing resources to be available to particular jobs. This new feature works by abstractly defining how much disk, memory, or CPU resources will be available to a particular unit of work. As a "gatekeeper," it can also be used to prevent jobs from running until there is enough processing power to finish the job.

In future releases, Nissan said, ESP Espresso will build on its object-oriented design to incorporate new types of workloads expected to be put into use in the next few years. "An area we're taking our software into is bringing Web services together, and integrating the Web services with different batch jobs," he said. "ESP Espresso is an object manager that just happens to do a good job of managing jobs. It manages objects that can be just about anything in the datacenter. . . . What our tool does is manage processes, where the objects can be anything from Web services to manual tasks to batch jobs."

ESP Espresso became available September 30 on a limited-release basis. It will become generally available in November. A license for ESP Espresso Release 3 (including the ESP Workstation license) costs $10,000. The failover option costs an additional $10,000, and a license for an ESP Agent on a four-way processor costs $6,000. For more information, go to www.cybermation.com.