PRESS RELEASE – TECHNICAL UPDATE

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Users welcome OSM’s latest release of the industry-leading
job scheduler – COSbatch

August 2002

As part of the continuing development of the COSbatch product – a process which responds to the needs of the COSbatch user community – OSM has released version 2.3 of this industry-leading job scheduler with immediate effect.

V2.3 of COSbatch includes built-in support for scheduling in response to external events and incorporates the full operations workflow module, previously known as COSduty, in the standard distribution.

COSbatch – OSM’s popular, network-aware production management and job scheduling package for networks of UNIX, Linux and Windows^® systems – has long been able to use external events to trigger job and suite execution, but the mechanism has been ancillary rather than integral.

It was natural that users should wish to have standard event types definable within COSbatch so that it would be simpler to write complex precondition statements for jobs or job suites. COSbatch v2.3 is the first release in which event-based scheduling is a built-in function.

The ability to recognize particular system events in combination with the traditional pre-condition types allows COSbatch to schedule the execution of jobs and suites in response to complex circumstances, but to do so simply, without complex scripting. Whereas standard internal pre-conditions respond to job exit codes and character strings, recognizable external events include, for example, the existence of a file, the presence of a process in execution, or the availability of disk space.



	This figure shows the form used to administer the definitions of the system events which will subsequently be used to initiate the execution of jobs and suites. Events may be of the following types . . .		Ÿ the existence, or not, of a file Ÿ the presence, or not, of an executing process Ÿ the availability of disk space Ÿ the availability of CPU capacity Ÿ any user definable event

COSbatch v2.3 is also supplied with an integrated version of OSM's COSduty (www.cosdutyssa.com) operations workflow management product. Whereas COSbatch handles system tasks, operator tasks (changing tapes, checking logs etc.) are handled by COSduty. By combining both products into a single deliverable, COSbatch v2.3 offers users one component to manage all production tasks through a single user interface.

COSduty works on the principle that many systems administration tasks can be delegated in a controlled, audited manner to less technical staff. Organizations using COSduty have reported up to 60% of administration workload being delegated to staff who are keyboard-literate but without specific systems experience.

The first releases of COSbatch v2.3 have been tested to ensure compatibility with several of the most common operating systems, specifically:

Sun™ Solaris V8 and above
IBM AIX 4.2 and above
HP-UX 11 and above
HP/Compaq Tru64 v5.1 and above
Linux v2.2 and above
Windows^® NT 4 and Windows^® 2000

For more information on this or any other of OSM’s products or services, either go to www.cosadmin.com/forms/form.html?form=cbaskq, email info@osminc.com or call (206) 583 8373 (USA) or +44 (0)1344 638000 (Europe).

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FURTHER INFORMATION

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