Scheduling Software

[Clara Rowe]

Hello Experts!
I'm interested in your point of view on scheduling software. We went live on SAP in September 2005 and are also running Oracle Financials. We use Tivoli and Netbackup for DR. Our apps are mostly Unix (HP and IBM) but there are some Windows NT apps as well. We are looking for a scheulding software with the focus on how easy it is to monitor, rerun, and maintain. Also want to be able to forecast jobs acrossed platforms and review previous run history from a single point.

We are currently looking at Control-M, UC4, and TIDAL. I would appreciate any information you could provide - Pros and Cons.

Thank you in advance.

Clara

[Florian Heigl (new acc) · Accepted solution]

I've heard only good things about UC4, and I like it's looks, even though I personally never used it.

HP has partnered with Orsyp for their Dollar Universe ($U) scheduler, but -ummmm- even though I have spent a lot of time working with it, I can't state I loved it. (I could even say I think it's a PITA). It's unbeaten for large-scale worldwide setups due to it's architecture (highly timezone aware, no SPOF, clearly defined development / testing of batches), but if You don't need that, stay away from it.

- I really suggest a strong look at UC4.



PS:
Personally I wished all batch schedulers died and were replaced by cluster aware solutions like unicore or grid engine that were not designed 20 years ago *g*

[Patrick Wallek]

We currently use the IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/scheduler/

It works pretty well. It has a java based GUI front-end that you can use to see all jobs across all server that have the scheduler agent installed.


I have also used AutoSys in a previous job (about 5 years ago). It was OK as well, though I thought it was a pain to maintain.

[Clara Rowe]

I saw Tivoli's product about 7 years ago and I was less than impressed. Has it made huge improvements?

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

I just had a fun read while googling for a (Gartner?) report on different schedulers:

http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,68542,00.html

- it was written in 2002 and 'event based scheduling' was considered a great feature by the authorm, which is quite funny since it's a no-brainer to use i.e. filewatchers for use with cron.
- basically all of these companies bought a replacement for having the slightest clue of their enviroment, they didn't even figure out how to get a job restarted until they got an auto-restart checkbox :)

I'll join http://saturn.sourceforge.net/ now and build a better scheduler [tm] *grins*

[Clara Rowe]

We had a conversation with them this morning. It didn't really help as far as I was concerned. Although, they are the ones that brought up UC4. So they did give us something useful.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

If You're planning to create an evaluation testbed, I would suggest You You look out for glitches like the following:

- scheduling latency
- what happens if You schedule like 3000 jobs within a few minutes and how long does it take till they are actually 'in'?
- are any jobs lost?
- does the scheduler still schedule afterwards?
- how often a mainteanance of some sort is needed, in days or launches.
- how reliable the event exchange mechanisms are
- how well the product deals with i.e. a sudden shutdown
- how good is the user administration in the utility - is it easy to set up restricted accounts for different operator classes?
- does it provide any kind of auditing, revisioning?
- does it implement quality control mechanisms?
- how is it backed up and recovered?
- can You extract and edit database objects.

Flo

[Clara Rowe]

Thanx, those are all good things to consider. I was a scheduler from 1988 to 1998 using CA-7 on mainframes. We installed and started using Control-M right befor I left to become a Unix administrator. So I am kind of taking the lead on this. It's been awhile and I certainly do appreciate all of your suggestions.
Clara

[JonSmith]

I was quite suprised to see that you were looking at Control-M, UC4, and TIDAL. We are evaluating the same products.

We are also considering ActiveBach (Windows/Linux Only) solution.

Where are you in the selection process?

[Clara Rowe]

My personal favorite was UC4. We ended up looking at Redwood as well, since we are an SAP shop. UC4 bent over backwards to get us what we needed. I found their approach refreshing. They never bashed the competition and gave me honest answers with no pressure. Our shop is not that big and we were looking at scheduling less that 1000 jobs. UC4 offered task based licensing and were very reasonable compared to the others. A lot of pressure has been placed to use the Redwood product and we may unltimately go that way. I use to use CA-7 in a very large shop. So I'm not new to the scheduling game. For my money UC4 then Control-M were the best. But it's not my money!