Resources

In spite of the popularity of “DevOps” many IT pros are still divided into two camps: development and operations. Although both groups do much more than their titles imply, they tend to look at enterprise solutions from different perspectives. In our area of batch job scheduling, we see a lot of humility among operations personnel Read More

When exploring automation of Hadoop processes, it’s important to consider best practices for securing and tracking who runs them, when they may be submitted to the schedule and what resources they should be allowed to consume. Whether using Hadoop for Big Data Analytics, social network architecture or marketing data mining, the questions are the same: Read More

Technology infrastructure decisions increasingly include some cloud component. Cloud services can decrease maintenance costs, increase reliability or improve efficiency. Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) is one such service that enables a company to migrate servers off site and into the Amazon cloud, mitigating the risks of power outages, energy fees and other costly issues. Basic Read More

Managing IT infrastructure is full of exceptions that are beyond your control – network latency, bad disks, power failures and human error. Fortunately, holiday batch scheduling is well within your control when you leverage centralized workload automation. Even in cases where different business units celebrate different sets of holidays, batch jobs can be configured to Read More

If you’ve experienced blocking or have been tempted to allow non-administrators to run batch jobs on your database, that’s exactly how the conversation might start. More likely, though, you’re reading this because your organization is growing, either in scale or complexity, and you need to break workload automation away from the limits imposed by native Read More

Note: This post was originally published in the February 2013 PowerShell.org TechLetter. The whole purpose of PowerShell is to automate tasks. So, why are some users still manually deploying scripts? And why are some organizations relying on one or two users to execute critical PowerShell scripts? The automation of PowerShell scripts is an important step Read More

The Ohio Department of Public Safety’s transition from the mainframe offers valuable insight into the benefits of legacy modernization. The lessons learned apply broadly to IT pros, but are especially relevant to those who rely on well-architected automation and scheduling in a mainframe environment. The challenge of creating a “Windows-based environment that met or exceeded Read More

In our last webinar, we took a closer look at the hidden costs of Windows Task Scheduler, the classic starting point for IT pros charged with automation. Looking at Task Scheduler with a critical eye can be a challenge. Task Scheduler has the advantages of both being free and being native to the Windows Server Read More