Halcyon Adds Forecasts to IBM i Job Scheduler

May 6, 2014 Alex Woodie

Finding quiet time can be a challenge in today’s fast-pace corporate environment, for people and servers. With the version 12 release of Halcyon Software‘s Advanced Job Scheduler, system administrators get a new forecasting feature designed to easily find lulls in the IBM i job schedule in which to run reports or apply updates. The company also used the COMMON conference to unveil features to its new WebSphereMQ offering.

The new job forecaster gives administrators an extensive view into all the jobs that Advanced Job Scheduler has slated to run. That view extends wide–to encompass jobs across multiple IBM i LPARs, as well as Windows and other supported platforms–and also extends into the future as far as an administrator needs.

“One of the problems that many sites have is windows,” says Halcyon technical services manage Paul Ratchford, who spent many years at CCSS before it was bought by HelpSystems last year. “They may only have two to three hours overnight and want to maximize the utilization of resources at that particular time.”

This feature will be particular useful for one-off jobs that can’t be scheduled in advanced, but still need to fit into the job schedule. “We’re trying to provide them with as much forecasting information to say, ‘OK, here’s what’s due to run based on your criteria, and here’s what’s forecast to run.’ So if somebody says ‘We need to quickly run this report and it’s going to take 30 minutes,’ we can easily find the window,” he says.

Setting future batch job schedules to avoid times of peak use, such as month-end and year-end processing, will also be easier. The forecasting feature doesn’t currently look at jobs that are sitting on the job queue, but that will be added with a future release, Ratchford says.

Halcyon’s Advanced Job Scheduler gets more advanced job forecasting capabilities.

Version 12 brings an overall boost to the Web-based GUI for Advanced Job Scheduler. Halcyon has spruced up the overall look and feel of the product, which is usable not only by IBM i professionals but those without IBM i skills. Halcyon continues to develop a 5250 interface for all of its products (and, yes, the forecasting feature is also available via the green screen).

Halcyon also updated MQ Manager, a new product launched two months ago to help IBM i shops manage their IBM WebSphere MQ environments.

The new release offers full support for WebSphere MQ components, including queues, listeners, channels, services, clusters, and events. It’s now fully available and all the potential missing areas that were not covered in the original release are covered under the new product, says Halcyon vice president of sales Garrett Schut. “Now everything that’s part of the WebSphere product is what we can manage,” he says.

Halcyon formally announced the new products–as well as a new release of Systems Operations Suite for IBM i (which we’ll cover in a future issue of Four Hundred Stuff–at the COMMON conference taking place this week in beautiful Orlando, Florida. For more info on the products, see www.halcyonsoftware.com.