ROC gives Maestro new notes for Open Systems

Scheduler’s open systems version builds on MPE expertise

HP 3000 sites look down when they take their first steps into Unix scheduling alternatives and see the prospect of massive footprints — or leaving no tracks at all. The task of scheduling and maintaining jobs, so essential to the HP 3000 way of computing, can require a separate server in Unix solutions, along with a separate database. Or for the cost-conscious migrating firm, scheduling might be relegated to the capabilities of cron, a Unix utility that leaves no trace of a job’s success or failure.

ROC Software takes its own step this summer on the scheduling journey for the open systems initiates in the 3000 community. ROC’s new Maestro for Open Systems can control an HP 3000’s jobs as well as those on Unix and Windows systems without the vagaries of agents. It doesn’t demand a big footprint — and it isn’t a joke like cron, according to ROC’s CEO Danny Compton.

“When I hear about cron, it makes me want to laugh,” he said while introducing his company’s new open systems scheduling solution. Maestro has been a serious scheduler with more than 15 years of heritage in the HP 3000 community, and the new Maestro for Open Systems has even more features than its MPE version. Built-in Unix utilities can’t compete, Compton said. “With cron, you don’t even know if a job is successful or not,” he said. “It just runs them.”

Maestro for Open Systems shows the status of all schedules; a right-click produces a menu of immediate actions for schedules that require assistance.

Migration experts all point to the HP 3000 environment’s job streaming and scheduling as a benefit which HP-UX, Linux and Windows cannot duplicate. “As people move off MPE, our customers say, ‘The native operating system must have more than this in it, right?’ But that’s Unix for you. It’s kind of bare bones.”

Maestro for Open Systems understands the fundamental scheduling concept that made Maestro for MPE so successful: tracking tasks that had to be completed within a business day. The software can re-create a previous day’s processing, for example. ROC has expanded the capabilities for the customers who want flexibility beyond the business day concept in their job scheduling.

Schedulers in the open systems market lean toward complexity. Tivoli’s Workload Scheduler, for example — a product that evolved away from HP 3000 support — requires a mainframe to drive it, installing and administering IBM’s DB2 database, and the ongoing maintenance of a mainframe app, Compton said. He worked on the Tivoli product before founding ROC, and Compton said Maestro for Open Systems avoids such overhead and the steep learning curve.

“It’s easy to install, has a small footprint, doesn’t require a babysitter and database administrator,” he said. “It’s like it’s a part of the operating system, but a lot more robust.”

A robust but simple solution architecture sounds a lot like MPE-style solutions, and ROC’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Broadway said that’s no coincidence. “We’re an MPE company that’s also an open systems company,” Broadway said. “We’re not an open systems company, like many of the others, that grudgingly have an agent that runs on MPE. We’re native oxygen breathers on the MPE environment.”

Agent technology, more popular among firms that include MPE among their supported environments, jumps across a network to start a process, attempts to determine if the process was successful, and reports back with what it observes. Interacting with the 3000’s $STDLISTs, dependencies among jobs — these details can fall outside the grasp of agent-based solutions.

Open systems products can handle some of that work, but at an alarming cost in overhead.

“When people look at the footprint and the amount of work it can take to install a scheduling solution, they start thinking its another thing they have to maintain,” Broadway said. “You don’t want to have buy a box just to run your scheduler.”

The Open Systems version of Maestro will support the technology with the highest buzz in future releases, Broadway noted. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the ability to launch jobs as Web services will be part of the product, the kinds of capabilities that Fortune 1000 companies want in their enterprises.

“We’re already working on Web interfaces,” Broadway said. “If you need to run a payroll job in response to a request from a Web site, you could invoke that job through a Web service. SOA is where all the sizzle is now. Most of the Fortune 1000 companies have some sort of Web service implementation in progress.”

High MPE standards

ROC wants to position the newest Maestro as part of an enterprise suite later this year, a collective of software designed for the shop with multiple environments in its enterprise. Expectations are especially high from the HP 3000 shops which are being migrated onto open systems by their application suppliers. Amisys sites, for example, just now starting to move onto Amisys Advance on HP-UX, already have job scheduling in place on MPE systems. And like the earliest migration adopters in the Summit credit union base, such sites want to move their application environments intact. A scheduler based on 3000 principles, but expanded for open systems, can forestall lots of rewriting.

“They need something that can reproduce the business logic in their environment,” Compton said. “Summit [credit union] customers are the same way: They need something to let them do that. We support things in Maestro for Open Systems like parameter substitutions in the jobs, in the same way they were supported in MPE. If you don’t have that, you have to rewrite all your jobs.”

ROC believes MPE customers will be keeping their 3000s online even after a migration, and so a scheduler that manages open systems and the HP 3000 has a waiting customer base. But it’s not as simple as building a product for ROC’s migrating customers to move onto. Maestro for Open Systems, Compton said, has a life alongside 3000 systems that will continue to work.

“We’ve really focused on our customer base that has open systems and MPE systems,” he said. “We’re trying to expand our footing for the products that we have. I wouldn’t say the majority of our revenue in the short term is predicted to come from MPE customers moving to other platforms.”