ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the aspect of justifying the purchase of a job scheduler and provides an analysis methodology that data center managers can use to evaluate job schedulers. There are two fundamental benefits that data center managers look to achieve when acquiring a production job scheduler. The first benefit is personnel-related cost savings. The second is the business-related savings. To evaluate the cost-saving factors of a job scheduler, the following three categories need to be examined: cost of implementation, recurring savings, and environmental support. The features and functions of a job scheduler that comprise recurring cost-savings can be sorted into three categories: automated schedule administration, ease-of-use considerations, and automated operations. The architecture of a job scheduler must provide the flexibility to meet centralized or decentralized requirements. The primary component of an open-systems-based job scheduler is the master schedule, which contains all rules created during the job-preparation step to meet production scheduling and output distribution requirements.
