Heirloom Computing Inc. announced a scheduler designed to run batch jobs on ELPaaS, Heirloom's Platform-as-a-Service for moving mission-critical enterprise applications to the cloud. The Heirloom Job Scheduler works with Heirloom's Job Entry Subsystem (JES) to enable IT managers to manage legacy applications in the cloud.
This offering is targeted at mainframe applications being exposed through private cloud, Mark Haynie, CTO of Heirloom Computing, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “It's targeted at IT departments that want to recreate the mainframe experience on a public, private or hybrid cloud environment. ELPaaS is a COBOL, CICS, VSAM, JES, JCL scheduler platform that operates on a variety of cloud infrastructures, leveraging the Java EE Application Server environments of those systems. We can run enterprise applications and their subsystems under WebSphere, for instance. ELPaaS is also ideal for moving enterprise mission-critical workloads from z/OS to z/Linux or off the mainframe onto Windows, Linux or UNIX.”
Heirloom offers support for legacy batch job languages such as IBM Job Control Language (JCL) as well as common scripting dialects, including UNIX shell and Python.
With the Heirloom cloud-based job scheduler, cloud instances are started and stopped by the scheduler during a batch window. The scheduler and the job entry subsystem divide jobs into classes of resources – CPU, database, network – manages concurrency among a large pool of resources, and collects job report output for later viewing, printing or distribution from a central cloud-based Web portal.
“There are many parallels between mainframe systems and cloud computing,” says Haynie. “A mainframe scheduler optimizes utilization at 95% or better. But when horsepower runs out, the jobs stack up. Everyone hopes all jobs in each job class finish before the end of the batch window.” Heirloom Computing's cloud-based scheduler distributes jobs to other cloud machines, he continues. “The advantage of this model is virtually unlimited horsepower for running batch jobs during a batch window, utilizing an elastic resource pool on a pay-as-you-go cloud model.”
ELPaaS is also designed to help ensure security and privacy of data through public key infrastructure – “encryption of all data in motion and at rest,” Haynie adds. “And it manages backup and recovery of data volumes, with backup retention to seven years.”
For more information about Heirloom Computing, visit http://www.heirloomcomputing.com.