Cybermation ESP 5 – The Service Governor

With organisations seeking to align their IT resources more effectively with business requirements, there is an increasing focus on ensuring that workloads are running effectively. A couple of weeks ago Cybermation released the latest version of its enterprise job scheduling software, Cybermation ESP 5, a tool designed to optimise workload execution, a technology for which there is huge demand.

Today’s data centres are now reaching a level of maturity whereby it is becoming possible to manage workloads more flexibly than even before. Modern systems, from the mainframe through Unix and Linux servers down to high-end Microsoft platforms, are now capable of hosting a range of applications. Today’s enterprise management systems are now seeking to ensure that workloads are run on the most appropriate platform to ensure that service level agreements are met whilst ensuring that data centre costs are optimised.

These are demands that workload optimisers were built to meet and Cybermation ESP 5 is at the forefront of these solutions. Cybermation ESP 5 is described by the company as a “cross-platform, event-based job scheduling solution”. Whilst this may be an accurate technical representation, it fails to portray just how valuable a piece of software ESP 5 really is.

Software to manage job scheduling has long been widely deployed but until very recently job scheduling has focused solely on the management of batch jobs. Indeed, this is precisely the area where Cybermation has been providing sophisticated functionality. The company’s software heritage has been to provide tools that can identify critical workloads in the environment, locate resources capable of supporting the critical workload and then optimising the runtime of the total workload. ESP can also accept policies to identify critical workloads and place SLAs against different aspects of the workload.

Many organisations have deployed ESP solutions to manage their batch workloads and have experienced excellent results with far fewer breaches of SLAs. However, the latest version of ESP takes the ideas used in the optimisation of batch workloads and brings them to the real time scenarios. ESP 5 is moving towards total Workload Automation and Enterprise Job Scheduling by providing facilities to manage job dependencies, real time and batch, across applications and infrastructure.

ESP 5 also provides Business Service Management and IT Service Governor extensions (Cybermation ESP Business Service Manager and Cybermation ESP Service Governor), specifically to help organisations align workload with business service objectives. With support for almost all major operating environments (including Mainframe, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Windows), ESP 5 has extended support to include native database integration capabilities for Oracle, DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server.

Job scheduling and optimisation have always been an extremely important, if somewhat undervalued, task. With IT systems now becoming more flexible, the need to optimise resource usage with fluctuating business needs will ensure that solutions such as those supplied by Cybermation will enjoy strong demand. It will be interesting to note how the major management software players respond to Cybermation’s continuing success and its development of increasingly sophisticated solutions.