z/VSE: 45 Years of Progress - z/VM - IBM

the need to automate. The retailer
needed a dynamic workload management
solution that could monitor its
email and File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
systems for requests, start the appropriate
batch job automatically when a file
arrives, and deliver the resulting output
to the requestor or to other downstream
jobs. The solution the company
chose integrated their platforms and
2automated a process that touches multiple
applications.
Consistent look & feel: Your IT staff
is one of your most valuable assets; they
must be as productive as possible.
Workloads are larger and more dynamic
than ever. Operators, job schedulers
and the production control team must
monitor and manage a high volume of
jobs, but this is just one of their many
tasks. Your staff must be able to do
more, more efficiently. They lack time
or bandwidth to manage jobs on different
platforms with different user interfaces.
An ideal dynamic workload
management solution provides the
same look and feel across the environment.
If your staff can understand the
workload management interface, they
don’t need expertise in different platforms
or applications.
With consistency across platforms,
you can do more with less. For example,
a computer manufacturer realized the
value of implementing a tool with a
consistent look and feel across all platforms.
It increased the number of jobs
from 12,000 to more than 85,000—at
more than 13,000 locations—and used
fewer people to manage the workload.
The manufacturer found it could deploy
workload automation to any platform
and any application with only minor
effort. This consistency and scalability
3helped the manufacturer reduce and
shorten outages.
Business impact: Knowing a job has
failed is one thing, but knowing what
that means to the business is a different
4
ballgame. For example, an operator
monitoring workloads may get an alert
such as “Job x57xa3 failed.” But what
does this mean? This failure could set
off a chain of events where many people
get involved—some unnecessarily—and
use time and resources to determine
what the error means and how to fix it.
This cryptic alert doesn’t show the business
impact of the job failure.
A more meaningful alert would say
“Payroll checks due on 6/15 are delayed
because job x57xa3 failed. You have two
hours to fix it before payroll process will
be late.” A robust alert shows the failure,
the impact it has on other processes,
and offers recommended solutions.
Because this type of intelligence provides
visibility into business process, it
lets you set priorities and correct the
most important problems first.
It’s important to fix a problem correctly
the first time and ensure that a
fix on application A doesn’t cause a failure
on application B. Intelligent,
dynamic workload management solutions
can provide this information, so
you reduce the risk of failures and save
the time and effort of correcting problems
multiple times.
An online retailer needed to understand
the impact of batch jobs on its
ability to meet SLAs. The company
needed to be able to define and manage
batch flows on a business process
level instead of the job level. It chose a
solution that monitors the progress of
each batch job, watching for conditions
that might cause a failure or
degrade performance in a way that
would jeopardize service levels; the
solution alerts staff when intervention
is required. By implementing dynamic
workload automation and batch impact
solutions, the company reduced manual
tasks by 40 to 50 percent in the
first two years and was able to absorb a
rapidly expanding workload without
hiring many people.
All the company’s revenue-generating
activities occur electronically, so
when the IT systems are down, operations
aren’t profitable. Outages also have
a ripple effect because partners and
users also can’t do business when the
company has an outage. Staff members
can see the business impact of events, so
they have the situational awareness that
helps them quickly identify which
events threaten to disrupt services.
Technical personnel can prioritize their
actions, addressing the most critical
issues first to ensure the company can
deliver its product to consumers and
business partners.
Planning & provisioning: Workloads
fluctuate. Sometimes, you can predict
when workloads will rise, but planning
for dynamic workloads can be challenging.
Intelligent, dynamic workload
management solutions provide forecasting
information based on prior
workloads, supporting the use of “whatif?”
scenarios. For example, a cable
television provider can use such scenarios
to determine what resources
they need for the hour preceding a payper-view
event.
The IT environment for a large discount
retailer with thousands of stores
and an online shop became so complex
it could implement changes to systems,
applications, and processes only once
annually, during a two-week window
around Easter. The retailer couldn’t
determine the impact of these changes
on related systems and applications, and
it typically had 18 unplanned outages
each year after the Easter change.
Unplanned outages are costly for online
retailers because customers can simply
click to another Website. By implementing
a dynamic workload management
solution, the retailer was able to assess
the impact of planned changes and
adjust them before implementation.
Unplanned outages evaporated in the
first year of system use. The value of
impact assessment is clear; preventing
problems is much easier and cheaper
than fixing them.
Dynamic Workload Management
Implementation Obstacles
Often, existing job scheduling software
lingers, even if it doesn’t provide
intelligence and automation, because of
the fear of the costs and risks of conversion.
When you move to dynamic
workload management, choose a vendor
that will provide the necessary support.
Select a solution that’s modular,
easy to use, and provides the criteria
discussed here. The rewards are high:
rapid integration between change management,
event management, workload
automation, problem management, and
impact management, as well as higher
efficiency, availability, and visibility of
IT processes.
Dynamic workload automation
brings efficiency, agility, and cost savings.
It lets you replace complex, enterprisewide
IT processes with measured,
cost-effective, low-risk initiatives. Z
Saar Schwartz, Control-M&D brand manager for BMC
Software, is an expert in software automation and document
management. He has spent the last 12 years in
R&D, marketing, and sales enablement positions,
researching automation and scheduling market segments
and implementing automation solutions for Fortune 500
companies. Prior to his BMC career, he spent six years as
an officer in the Israeli Air force working with complex
real-time software systems for combat airplanes. His education
is in aeronautical and space engineering.
Email: Saar_Schwartz@bmc.com
Kathy Klimpel is Solutions manager for Mainframe
Data Management at BMC, where she has worked since
1991. She started working with mainframes in 1986 and
has worked with IMS, DB2, storage, and monitoring
products.
Email: Kathy_Klimpel@bmc.com
6 2 • z / J o u r n a l • O c t o b e r / N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 0