IBM Updates Tivoli Batch Workload Scheduler

Published: April 13, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Organizations looking to coordinate the scheduling of batch applications running on disparate systems may want to check out the latest release of IBM's Tivoli Workload Scheduler and Tivoli Workload Scheduler for Applications. With the version 8.3 release of these products, which were announced last week, IBM is providing more flexibility and sophistication in setting up workload schedules.

Tivoli Workload Scheduler is a tool for modeling, planning, executing, and controlling the various phases of batch workload processes occurring on OS/400, z/OS, Unix, Windows, and Linux platforms. With this release, the company has focused on the product's capabilities in distributed systems (which most often means not iSeries or mainframe), including new scheduling plans that can span anywhere from an hour to several weeks. This release also allows users to associate more than one scheduling rule for an activity, to identify instances of the same activity scheduled over different days, to define dependencies between activities that are scheduled to run on different days or even on different weeks, and to save an activity as a draft or to associate a validity time window to an activity.

The product's mainframe capability has also been enhanced, as version 8.3 deploys the new Java-based Web services foundation that will be used for an upcoming release of Tivoli Workload Scheduler z/OS. With IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler for Applications 8.3, IBM has bolstered the products support for SAP's R/3 application, and introduced additional platform support for PeopleSoft and Oracle agents. IBM has also committed to supporting Tivoli Workload Scheduler on the Oracle database later this year through a fixpack (it currently only supports DB2 UDB).

OS/400 support for Tivoli Workload Scheduler is not what it could be. Only the fault tolerant agent (FTA) component of the product is supported on OS/400, according to IBM's announcement letter, which leaves out support for other components, including the distributed and z/OS connectivity, the JS console, and the remote CLI components. What's more, according to this IBM Web page, the product's FTA scheduling component supports only older release of OS/400, including V4R5 and V4R6, which is interesting because IBM never shipped a V4R6. But hey, you can't complain, because at least Software Group is beginning to notice the iSeries, right?