Conference turris::digital_unix

    In PTMIN(aka V4.0D) there is a class based scheduler which is bundled
    with the os.
    
    

Thanks, it looks like you guys were on top of this as I had hoped.  This 
leads to two more obvious questions:

1. When is 4.0D due to release?

2. Is the scheduler in 4.0D at least as good (functionality-wise) as the 
previous product - Polycenter Scheduler for Digital UNIX?  And BTW - what 
database product does it use, if any?

I can't figure out (beyond the obvious greed of making people buy 
CA-Unicenter) why CA doesn't just put Ingres in instead of Informix and keep 
on rolling....

Regards.

Polycenter Scheduler != class scheduler. Polycenter Scheduler was
a flavor of DECscheduler, no? It was kind of a super-cron. There 
are almost certainly other third party products (other than CA) that 
offer this but I don't know any specific names. 

			pete

Check out 

http://www-unix.zk3.dec.com/www/products.html

specifically under the polycenter scheduler...
the competitive products are

LSF, unison maestro, and CA...

If you know of others, let us know.

    Platinum has a product called AutoSys. Looks solid, but costly.
    
    Regards, Kris.

We were told by a CA business representative the other day that UNICENTER 
TNG won't be ported to Digital UNIX, just Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. All that 
Digital UNIX will eventually get are the agents. So even if you do want to pay 
the megabucks, you'll have to have a non-Digital UNIX (or Windows NT) to run it 
from.

I didn't ask how this fit in with the much vaunted tier 1 agreement ("port to 
Digital UNIX at the same time as everything else"), because we were in a meeting 
with the customer at the time...

PJDM

    I spoke with Judy Orava, the CA Business Relationship Manager, 2 days
    ago & she stated TNG is already ported to Digital UNIX and announcement
    activities are underway.   Both the server and agent products are
    ready.  Contact Judy at mroa::orava.
    
    Mark
    

    I believe my previous reply is not correct, and the latest info I have
    is:
    
    CA-Unicenter V1.1 available today on Digital UNIX
    CA-Unicenter TNG V2.0 will be available on Digital UNIX.  Porting is
    still in process, with availability scheduled for Q4FY97.  This
    includes the base product and agents.
    The 3D World Business View is currently planned for Digital UNIX.
    
    Potential customers should be made known to Judy Orava (mroa::orava)
    
    Mark
    

On a current project, our customer selected Control-M from New Dimensions
for use on Digital UNIX. The other batch scheduler to make their short
list was AutoSys from Platinum. Both products have agents on Digital UNIX, 
MVS, and OpenVMS. Platinum's OpenVMS agent was in field test during the fall
of 1996. New Dimensions has an NT agent planned for 1997. This customer uses
CA products on MVS, but neither Unicenter nor POLYCENTER Scheduler made it
to the short list. 

They chose Control-M based on a couple of very specific (minor) functional 
differences between AutoSys and Control-M.  Right now it appears that no
batch scheduler with agents running across Digital UNIX, MVS, and OpenVMS
has all the functionality required. We must modify JCL, DCL, and Korn shell
scripts to work around some minor shortcomings in Control-M. Certain setup 
fields requiring UNIX filespecs do not allow environment variable substition. 
So we are forced to use absolute filespecs. The product does not allow us to
easily rerun a failed job with a "one time parameter" (e.g. to restart in the 
middle of a script, bypassing a time consuming SQLLOADER step). The Control-M
"Enterprise Management Station" runs only on HP-UX. The Digital customer
complained repeatedly, but ended up moving an HP workstation over from
their engineering department for use as a Control-M management station.
This would not stop me from recommending Control-M, even thought the GUI
is not that great. It's the agent platform support and the functionality 
that are the show stoppers. 

POLYCENTER Scheduler V1.0 was a nice beginning. At V1 it was not ready for
use as a production batch scheduler, but better positioned as a system
manager's tool. At another customer site we were very frustrated in our
attempts to get the POLYCENTER Scheduler NT agent working (it never did).

From Digital's Mark Hebenstreit I also learned:
- Unison from Maestro is released on Digital UNIX (he sent me a press release).
- Sector7 has a scheduler that apparently runs on OpenVMS and Digital UNIX.
- OpenVision has a scheduler for Digital UNIX and so does XY Software.

    I have AutoSys installed at a customer and it works fine. We have
    about 30 Alphas under its control. We are moving everything off of
    Polycenter Scheduler (this customer hates CA very much) to AutoSys.
    
    My only problem with AutoSys is that it has only one name space- if you
    wanted a job, like StopSap, to run in more than one 'box' you must give
    it different names for each box. Gets tedious, but it works.
    
    The GUI is nice, but the command line interface is very complete and
    understandable, so we use it a lot, especially when dialed in from home
    to check on things.
    
    We have not found any bugs with it, it seems to do what is claimed.

The problem that Ron mentions in .10 is the reason that our customer
chose Control-M over AutoSys. They did not want to define multiple names
for the same job across numerous batch runs. Hopefully, Platinum may fix 
this problem in a future release of AutoSys. This would provide a solid 
alternative to New Dimensions' scheduler (Control-M). As of December 1996 
New Dimensions had no plan to implement the Control-M "Enterprise Control 
Station" on Alpha. 

Maestro from Unison failed to make the short list because the Unison
sales support people could not get the demo to work. This would not 
cause me to rule out Unison for consideration in future projects.

Having best-of-breed batch schedulers on Digital UNIX is critical in 
large enterprise systems opportunities (e.g. the 30+ Alpha servers
mentioned in the previous note). This area is showing improvement.
With the sale of POLYCENTER Scheduler we are less prone to compete 
with Platinum, New Dimensions, and Unison. That's a good thing.

    For those interested in alternative Unix Scheduler products, here is
    another one.
    
    It's called BQ+ and is produced by Australian Software Innovations
    (Spire Technologies in the States and Software Innovations in the UK).
    We have an alliance with them over their Open Aviator (Sysmon) product,
    for performance monitoring trend analysis. Their data collectors are
    vendor independant and feed into our Capacity Planning tool.
    
    BQ+ does the following stuff...
    
    Schedules - Weekly,daily,hourly,1st Tuesday,Last Friday,17th Working
    day,Every Monday, Every Weekday, Specific Dates
    
    Queues - Anu number of queues,Max concurrent jobs per queue,Max runs
    times per job,Active time windows, Access restrictions by user group,
    pre-process command option
    
    Enquiries - by job, by job suite, by user, by start time, by state
    
    Options - start at set time/date, run on specified queue/schedule, bank
    holidays options, action on error/completion
    
    Audit Logs - detailed logs for each job, daily accounting files,
    CPU/elapsed time by job, online log/history enquiries
    
    Dependency - Success of other jobs, Failure of other jobs, Completion
    of other jobs, presence of a file
    
    Security - Administrators/Operators/Users, submit/enquiry or no access
    for users, root access restrictions
    
    interface - X, ACSII menus, command line
    
    Don't know if our alliance with Software Innovations covers this
    product as well, but it seems like a reasonable point product solution.
    
    Another solution to the currect scheduler on Unix dilema!
    
    Guy