Slash Job Scheduler Setup Work by Half, ASCI Says
March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie
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A new release of the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts contains new features that reduces the amount of job setup work by 50 percent, the company claims. The New Jersey software company, which supports the IBM i server with its job scheduler, also unveiled the results of a survey that demonstrates the importance of job scheduling to cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives. Among the enhancements in ActiveBatch version 10, which ASCI announced nine months ago and shipped in February, are a job library that contains hundreds of “production-ready” job templates that the company says enables developers to assemble jobs and workflows faster, with less time spent on researching, writing, and testing code. A new “check-out, check-in” feature lets users collaborate on the same ActiveBatch objects simultaneously. The company says a built-in “conflict resolution tool” ensures that updates to objects don’t hit any snafus. The company has also included five new “views” in ActiveBatch that are designed to help developers and administrators quickly see exactly what’s going on with their cross-platform job flows. Among the new views are Map, Machine Load, Gantt, Forecast, and Workflow Optimizer views. ActiveBatch is a Windows-based enterprise job scheduler that helps organizations manage workloads running across IBM i, Windows, Linux, Unix, mainframe, OpenVMS, and Mac OS environments. The software supports several scheduling mechanisms, and features various ways to automate activities such as database integration and script execution. The company (which is not to be confused with the Advanced Systems Concepts division of HelpSystems) added support for i5/OS V5R4 and IBM i 6.1 back in 2009. A study released by ASCI shows that workload automation has a big role to play in cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives. The company says that while only about 2 percent of survey respondents say they’re using workload automation tools with their cloud or virtualization projects now, more than 20 percent plan to use the software for those purposes in the future. The company says survey results also point to workload automation playing an important role in big data initiatives, as well as “onboarding and offboarding,” the corporate euphemism that means hiring and firing people. The field of “DevOps”–referring to the collective work done under the banner of IT development and operations–is also fodder for the harmony of workload automation. ASCI president Ben Rosenberg says IT workload automation is well-suited to solve challenges presented by cloud and virtualization. “Efficient resource utilization in a pay-as-you-go world is critical,” he says in a statement. “Because computing tasks are more dynamic and unpredictable than ever, new solutions are needed to ensure that the right amount of computing resources are available to meet SLAs and general business requirements, at the exact time they’re needed–no more, no less.” RELATED STORIES ASCI Ramps Up Migration Effort for Job Scheduler ASCI Delivers More Application Hooks with Job Scheduler ASCI Job Scheduler Gets Hooks for Nagios ASCI Delivers Java Support with Job Scheduler
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