IT Automation

White Paper

It’s not an enviable job – managing data amounts that are growing exponentially, business processes that are growing more complex and, at the same time, applications that are becoming more diversified. As an IT manager in this day and age, it’s easy to see why you ask yourself everyday “Why do I do this?” Administration is obviously not getting easier, especially as budgets are tightening and your management continually asks you to do more with less.

There is only one viable way to move forward when trying to balance the diverging demands of economic efficiency and technical innovation – automating the IT landscape as much as possible. Data centers are dynamic – continuously growing over time and constantly changing in their makeup. As applications are added and removed, it’s essential to define dependencies between these various processes and the impact on business units when application performance degrades (or improves). Organizational roles change as well – making it even more complex to track who is responsible for certain applications.

Figure 1: Enterprise Scheduling Architecture

© MVP Systems Software, Inc. www.JAMSScheduler.com IT workload automation is essential, where fundamental infrastructure processes and maintenance tasks are defined and automated. There’s no reason for anyone to be spending time doing routine tasks that can be automated in this day and age:

 Starting and stopping databases  Backing up databases  Database restores  Running scripts  ETL processes for pushing data into data warehouses

This is just a small sampling of the critical processes in a data center than can be automated. Moreover, these processes take lots of time and are prone to errors when manual intervention occurs. Many of these processes are also inter-related where certain tasks and processes cannot run until prior related tasks run successfully. After all, it’s hard to process a file if the preceding FTP transfer never succeeded in the first place.

Automation is the key. And with the automation technologies available today, such as Windows PowerShell, it’s almost insane not to automate.

Figure 2: Real-time Dashboard

JAMS Job Scheduler automates every IT process while providing you with a real-time dashboard. At a glance, you can see which processes are running, which dependencies are being satisfied and which notifications are generated if SLA’s are not met. With JAMS Job Scheduler in place, workloads are streamlined and transparent. This means that even continuous or long running processes that comprise multiple applications and operating systems are managed and monitored through JAMS.

© MVP Systems Software, Inc. www.JAMSScheduler.com Aside from handling processes running across a wide range of operating systems like Windows, UNIX, Linux, System i, OpenVMS, and OSX, JAMS also covers a host of applications including SAP, Oracle EBS, MS Dynamics, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Symitar Episys. This is especially important as investments in existing applications are protected as JAMS Job Scheduler has the ability to cover all of your requirements, regardless of operating system or application.

As processes are often inter-related, JAMS Job Scheduler easily identifies and displays the dependencies that exist. As the relationships between processes grow more and more complex and involve more and more disparate applications, JAMS integrates seamlessly with Windows Workflow, and offers a host of workflow activities for you to leverage. Event- based scheduling becomes a reality with JAMS.

JAMS Job Scheduler provides for flexible calendaring, as certain processes need to be run on specific days and times. For example, knowing monthly balances may not be computed until the last business day of the month, there will be specific processes that cannot run until the last business day of the month. JAMS takes any and all company-specific calendars into consideration. While some processes need to run every 10 minutes, other processes may run once a day, and yet others may only run on Mondays, unless Monday happens to be a company-specific holiday. JAMS Job Scheduler calendaring provides you with an unlimited number of calendaring options.

Figure 3: Flexible Calendaring

What happens if you are already leveraging basic tools like Windows Task Scheduler, SQL Server Agent, and Cron? With resources being tight, you don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel. JAMS Job Scheduler offers conversion utilities, making it very easy for JAMS to absorb existing IT processes without having to start from scratch. JAMS converts jobs and scripts from all of the aforementioned tools as well as other COTS solutions. All of these processes can be moved into JAMS so that all of the features and capabilities of JAMS are now exposed to your existing processes. As a result, the ROI on JAMS Job Scheduler is extremely fast, usually within 90-120 days as the time to implementation for JAMS is significantly shortened.

JAMS is also unique in that it’s built on a .NET framework, making it as much a development tool as an IT operations tool. Your application development team can embed automation functionality in its own custom applications through JAMS, quickening the time to market of your internal applications.

In keeping with conventional IT practices, JAMS Job Scheduler supports the ability to run separate environments for development, testing, staging, and production. Yet, with a simple right-click, processes and tasks can be moved from one environment to another without causing issues.

JAMS establishes enterprise accountability the moment a job is defined. Each time a job is modified, JAMS records the detail of any and all changes. With a few clicks, prior versions can be accessed, restored or audited to discover who made the changes and when they were made. When regulators and auditors perform IT reviews, you will have a complete history of all processes and jobs running in your enterprise.

© MVP Systems Software, Inc. www.JAMSScheduler.com As JAMS is an object-oriented solution, processes defined in JAMS can easily be copied and/or moved which acts as a tremendous time saver. When changes are made, changes are just made to one object and that change is executed in all related jobs. Service providers can run multiple JAMS installations separated logically from one another yet managed centrally.

Permitting business users, developers and support staff access to workload automation can effectively reduce an organization’s dependence on already taxed IT operations staff. JAMS Job Scheduler not only enables you to distribute permissions to non-administrative users but also provides granular controls to specify how those users interact with individual jobs and the job schedule.

The goal of intelligent IT Operations is to keep things orderly, increase transparency, and free up personnel for critical business projects. JAMS Job Scheduler facilitates optimization and automation of fundamental infrastructure processes and maintenance tasks so that performance and availability increase. Having a centralized management console in JAMS solves the problem that heterogeneous IT landscapes so often entail. With JAMS in place, workloads can be distributed error free and streamlined.

About JAMS JAMS Job Scheduler is a full-featured enterprise job scheduling and workload automation system. JAMS is the only job scheduling system built on a .NET framework. JAMS is the first enterprise job scheduling system that can be leveraged by both IT Operations Personnel and Application Developers. With its roots in Windows, JAMS also supports running processes across a variety of operating systems (UNIX, Linux, System i, OpenVMS, etc.) and applications (SAS, SAP, SQL, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Symitar, Ecometry, etc.)

To learn more about JAMS, please visit www.JAMSScheduler.com or call 800-261-JAMS.

About MVP Systems Software, Inc. For more than 20 years, MVP Systems Software, Inc. has provided leading-edge batch job scheduling and workload automation solutions to its more than 750+ customers. Customers include household names like JPMorgan Chase, UCLA, Boeing, FINRA, Manulife Financial, Kaiser Permanente, The Hartford, and the US Postal Service. MVP’s solutions are delivered in traditional software as well as SaaS models. You can learn more about MVP Systems Software at www.mvpsi.com.