After spending more than 20 years making Robot/SCHEDULE the most robust job scheduler for the System i, Help/Systems is now expanding our view of the data center to let those outside of the System i platform enjoy the power of Robot/SCHEDULE. We’ve found that almost every System i (iSeries, AS/400) has at least one other server—whether it is UNIX, Linux, or Windows—running alongside it. Our goal in developing Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise was to create a tool that would leverage your “Robot experience” to these other platforms, and a tool that administrators of these platforms could readily adopt.
Why System i-centric?
Robot/SCHEDULE, running on the System i platform, is a very reliable job scheduler that can be replicated with common high availability solutions. With over 9,000 customers already using Robot/SCHEDULE, we felt confident we could provide our solution to even more platforms in the data center. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise uses the System i to house its database and deliver the consistent rules for scheduling and event-driven processes. Its Java interface provides the modern look and feel that Windows users are used to. In short, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise extends the great features of Robot/SCHEDULE to attached servers.
What do Windows, UNIX and Linux need in an automated schedule?
Windows, UNIX and Linux servers often receive files from other servers that should launch a process. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise is designed to watch for these key events and trigger the appropriate job. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise can watch for directories being added, directories growing, file sizes changing, files being added, or files being removed. This event-driven scheduling ends the guessing game for enterprise scheduling. Once a condition is met, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise launches a process on any of the four server types.
The software that runs on the UNIX, Linux, or Windows server is called a Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise “agent.” Agent events can be triggered by an application, Windows service, or a daemon starting. Application developers can trigger events from their programming language of choice through the API interfaces to Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise. The event monitor history is automatically recorded in reports for administrators.
What about existing scheduling?
Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise can copy Cron jobs, MS SQLServer task, and Windows tasks to easily create a Robot/SCHEDULE job. The job automatically contains relevant information about the operating system’s environment, such as paths and environmental variables.
Note: For those of you who have Robot/CLIENT, Help/Systems can help you convert your RCLEXEC commands to the new Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise agents.
Reports and security
For many years, Robot/SCHEDULE users have been able to drill into history, see who changed a job, receive comprehensive reports, and meet service level agreements in their batch processing.
Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise extends these capabilities to all the servers you work with. It is simple to drill into Windows, UNIX, and Linux logs from the Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise completion history for each task. Each time your job runs, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise automatically makes a copy of the sysout and syserr logs.
For security, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise supports encrypted file transfers and secured conversations across agents. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise also supports all the current audit features of Robot/SCHEDULE. And, you can use reporting tools like the Good Morning Report and the Job Monitor reports to monitor jobs for the enterprise. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise helps you keep abreast of your service level agreements and meet COBIT auditing requirements.
In summary, Help/Systems developed Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise in response to the needs we heard from you. We heard that you needed to be able to schedule across multiple platforms using an interface that PC users were comfortable with. We listened to you and we delivered Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise.
Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services