Terma Software Labs Inc., a provider of workload automation and job scheduling technologies, says it is now shipping a mainframe-enabled version of its Workload Automation engine, which works alongside CA Workload Automation AE, Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler and Stonebranch Opswise Automation Center. The new release, JAWS for CA 7, is intended to assist mainframe sites address system size and data complexity that is overwhelming most traditional job-scheduling systems.
Add to this challenge the shrinking pool of mainframe operations skills, Walter Goodwin, CEO of Terma, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “Beyond that though, there's the ever-present issue of also replacing the insights into your environment that are also lost with turnover, that typically only come over time, painfully and inefficiently. JAWS not only keeps up with the shrinking talent pool, but affords a hugely more efficient management mechanism. I know it's an overused expression, but this is a true paradigm shift, and offers the increased efficiency and optimization that one would necessarily expect from such a label.”
With the added connection to CA 7, customers can now visualize their workload from an entirely different perspective. Administrators, operators, and application developers can evolve from a job by job success/fail approach to a SLA driven Jobstream methodology, thus enabling them to increase efficiency and dramatically reduce risk of financial penalty.
JAWS for CA 7 also will include the ability to be installed in either a distributed or mainframe environment with a read only connection, so as to not impact the underlying workload engine. Additional features include performance analytics, SLA assurance, critical path visualization, and jobstream and data set correlation.
“Increased optimization and efficiency measures apply everywhere across the datacenter - mainframe processing isn't an exception,” says Goodwin. “If someone were to put a gun to your head and say, 'Go optimize that!' - where would you look to improve efficiency? With a solid understanding of which processes fall within your critical path, and which do not, you know exactly what to address in order to meet internally or externally imposed SLAs. And predicting this up front, by following along discerned critical paths and factoring in targeted timelines, is the only way to understand when you will fail to meet deadlines, where the breach will happen, and what you can specifically pinpoint and thus address, in advance, to ensure that you avoid the problem entirely. That is exactly where predictive analytics comes into play.”
More information on Terma Software Labs is available at www.termalabs.com.