empowering business innovation by optimization an · pdf fileruns on mainframe as batch jobs...

28 Manish Bhatnagar, Prof. Jayant Shekhar

International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in Computer Science

IJIACS

ISSN 2347 – 8616

Volume 4, Special Issue

May 2015

Empowering business Innovation by Optimization – An opportunity to

maximize availability, save time and cost

Manish Bhatnagar1, Prof. Jayant Shekhar

2

1Research Scholar ,

2Director

Subharti Institute of Technology and Engineering

Swami Vivekanand Subharti University, Meerut

India

Abstract—Growing need for legendary Main-

frame for mission-critical processing power, re-

duced energy use and a low TCO. Batch optimi-

zation stays as an important concern for many

companies today, whether merging workloads,

supporting growth, reducing cost and extending

the online window for real customers. By conti-

nually adapting to trends and evolving IT with

the mainframe, we’re driving new approaches to

handle the increasing traffic of transaction load

generated by increasing IT dependency around

the globe and connecting all the boundaries in

the world, for meeting this demand IT need to

work restless and reinvent their suite of infra-

structure and unleash the power of their existing

technology to make the extraordinary possible,

today's IT enabled world need 100% availability

of system with Comprehensive, multi-layered

strategy for reliability and serviceability Opti-

mized for real-world, enterprise-class transaction

processing and batch processing. This paper ex-

plains the importance of maximizing Operational

efficiency and different techniques to review the

operation processing of your current production

batch to determine whether it is operating effi-

ciently.

Keywords—Mainframe, Batch Optimization,

Reliable, Availability, Secure, Cost, Schedule,

Business.

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper describes a general approach that can

be used to optimize the batch window in a z/OS

environment. This paper outlines a structured

methodology using anti-patterns and tools that

can be followed to increase batch productivity.

Ultimately Business needs to innovate un-

matched scalability to support millions of trans-

actions per day, to gain total confidence in ser-

vices through the highest security and availabili-

ty with their tight Integration with core business

processes, applications and data. There are sig-

nificant workloads that still run on Mainframes

and hence it becomes important to have an opti-

mized batch schedule which promotes cost re-

duction in terms of CPU utilization and the re-

sources needed support and monitor batch

processing. Simultaneously, it will also reduce

the other related costs as well. The recurring li-

cense costs are associated with usage, optimizing

Mainframe batch workload will also go down.

The biggest companies in the world, whose vi-

sionary endeavors make our world smarter and

more connected, rely on the IBM mainframe. In

this competitive, revolutionary world, IT leaders

are busy inventing new ways to reduce your

mainframe cost structure. Batch optimization is a

universal approach in analyzing the batch contri-

bution to overall system performance. This paper

talks about the different ways in which we can

look towards batch tuning or optimization.

The ability to constantly evolve IT enabled

business rapidly and reliably is a core challenge

for today’s software engineering community.

Mainframe is endlessly leading the tag of most

robust, trustworthy, secure and available system

ever developed. That's why 92 of the top 100

banks, 23 of the top 25 retailers in the US, and

10 out of 10 of the top insurers trust their busi-

ness to run on the IBM mainframe. Especially in

a large-scale enterprise computing, the constant

market pressure, along with frequent mergers



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and acquisitions in growing world, forces enter-

prises to constantly optimize their internal organ-

ization. Unfortunately, this internal organization

is essentially tied to the architecture of the IT

portfolio. When that portfolio resists evolution,

it becomes an undefeatable.

In the current world of 24X7 requirements for

online systems which are being used across mul-

tiple time zones of the globe, data centers con-

tinues to process a considerable workload that

runs on mainframe as batch jobs for a large

number of clients. Batch processing is one of the

instruments to save time and reduce cost imple-

ment lean aspects for you Client. By focusing, on

the functional business critical aspects with

available batch processing automation and opti-

mization technology, We can boost our return on

your mainframe investment, you’ll also align IT

closer with the business, and that is the key to

both IT and business success.

Mitigating business risk in a digitally enabled

world, as all business operations become depen-

dent on IT Mobile devices pose unprecedented

security challenges, Globally used services like

VISA, ATM, online Trading etc has created a

revolution in IT world and now there is no time

for downtime, companies cannot tolerate the av-

erage cost of system failure or security breaches.

Today Client need unmatched availability for

continuous operations. Business demands pre-

dictive IT analytics to spot potential failures be-

fore they occur and the most the most compre-

hensive suite of disaster recovery solutions.

The hardware’s reliability, availability and

serviceability along with the operating system’s

security, and its data’s integrity are unmatched

by any other technology. 'RAS' is one of the

most important things when you talk about a sys-

tem or an infrastructure, as it includes numbers

of aspects of a computer and application, reveal-

ing its capacity to be in service every time. In

fact, we can define a system in seconds knowing

its RAS level. The more an infrastructure RAS

level is high, the more it may be trusted. We can

then talk about a 24/24 and 7/7 service, which

mean there is no down-time accepted, and we

expect IT infrastructures with RAS characteris-

tics to have a full up-time. These features help a

system to stay fully operational for a very long

period (months and even years for Mainframes)

without reboot or crash.

II. RELATIVE PERFORMANCE ANALY-

SIS AND SCALABILITY

Different research communities have addressed

different aspects of the problem, bringing to bear

a variety of research traditions, problem perspec-

tives, and analytical techniques [1]. The extent

of this restructuring process varies among differ-

ent areas of the financial services industry [7].

Already, several truncated branch-and-bound

techniques, priority-rule methods, and schedule-

improvement procedures of types tabu search

and genetic algorithm has suggested improve-

ment procedures for resource-constrained project

scheduling [10].

A Statistics analysis: You can obtain statistics

with log analysis and provide reports with Tivoli

Dynamic Workload Console.

B Analysis track log: You can create a report of

track log events. The following options are

available when creating a report:- Audit, debug,

or both.

C Audit created through job batch submis-

sion: When creating the report, the only required

value is the type of input for the report. If you do

not provide data for the remaining fields, all the

records in the input files are selected. The output

of the report is written to the file specified dur-

ing installation.

D Reporting: The standard and user-defined re-

ports on the Tivoli Dynamic Workload Console

can:

Display product plan details Track and tune

workload capacity Control the timely workload

execution according to goals and SLA’s.

III. RELATED PREVIOUS WORK

This paper talks about the basic practices and

processes that can be used in optimizing a batch

workload and reducing burning MIPS. Batch

Processing is used in various mission critical

business environments spanning from banking



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systems that process interest calculations and

other accounting related tasks to retail and

supply chain environments where the inventory

processing and re-order values need to be up-

dated, as well as an environment for business

intelligence where the overnight batch stream

replicates key business data to create a produc-

tion copy for use in data marts for business anal-

ysis and in support of business intelligence. In

the past, job scheduling has been primarily sug-

gested for supercomputers, real-time, and paral-

lel computers [4]. In security-aware job schedul-

ing, the scheduling process becomes much more

challenging [5], [6]. There have been several re-

cent advancements in tackling the replication-

based job scheduling problem. Bansal et al. [3]

suggested minimizing the turnaround time of a

parallel application using replication.

A. System Configuration

As a first step, look at the complete holistic view

of the systems health by examining parameters

such as CPU usage and paging/swapping. Sys-

tem capacity trends should be analyzed, based on

spare capacity availability, the provisioning of

initiators can also improve the performance. The

analysis of the CPU usage with batch contention

for a batch workload can provide pointers to

spare system capacity. Studying batch workload

peaks will further help us to determine what ac-

tions to take, either in shifting the specific batch

workload to a different time zone to reduce its

contribution to overall MSU Peak.

B. Analysis of top CPU Consuming

Applications

We should primarily focus on batch throughput,

scheduling, timing and resource consumption

and improving the batch window to reduce costs.

The research on transaction system based on

mainframe mainly states system requirements,

running environments, system structure, basic

design concepts, functionality and system securi-

ty precautions [13].

C. Batch Scheduling

The management of a batch window either in

production or test environments will have an im-

pact on the processing delay and on larger batch

windows. Though the batch scheduling is done

using scheduling tools such as IBM TWS/OPC,

CA7, ZEKE, Control-M or ASG products.

Few Best Practices for Batch Scheduling:

1. Draw and analyze the internal and external

dependency charts before actually setting up in

the tool

2. Identity the critical path for a particular se-

quence of the job flow and try to minimize or

avoid the redundant dependencies

3. Create a logical group of jobs in one stream

based on application and/or business need

4. Explore parallel running of additional

streams

5. Consider the allocation of special resources

for a set of jobs accessing common

tables/objects

6. Every six months carry out an assessment of

obsolete jobs and periodically clean up the sys-

tem for both production and test environments

D. Handling of frequently failing jobs

Though the frequently failing jobs will cause a

lot of resource consumption in the form of CPU

cycles, etc., they will also require human re-

sources in restarting the jobs and frequent inves-

tigation of exception. The key is to apply soft-

ware engineering to the maintenance and en-

hancement of existing up and running systems

lies in applying reverse-engineering approaches

[8] and definitely not only looking ahead but al-

so optimizing the current running system and

building the best availability and scalability.

Here are few steps which can help us to reduce

these frequently failing jobs/applications, just by

following simple techniques we can reduce CPU

usage drastically and also the related man power

behind resolving these reoccurring issues:

1. Record all the incidents/problems /calls/ is-

sues/ changes, along with the number of occur-

rences with time for the defined period within a

month or quarter with quick resolution and per-

manent fix.

2. Track detailed information such as the ac-

tual root cause of the job failure with informa-



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tion on which step the job got failed in and any

work around solutions.

3. Most important is to perform the cyclic re-

view of these jobs with the applications’ Subject

Matter Experts (SME)/owners/Client to develop

a permanent solution for them, which will be a

mark that same will not happen again also we

can think of futuristic problem which might oc-

cur in near future know as farsightedness, which

will surely increase client trust and build person-

al relationship to attract more business.

4. Analyze the dependencies of the frequently

failing jobs and determine if the culprit job can

be moved out of the current stream, which can

reduce the risk of a job holding up a successor

job.

5. Publish the CPU savings achieved through

reduction of the failures which will motivate the

support team to develop the practice of identify-

ing potential batch candidates for fixing on a

regular basis.

E. Implementing Data in Memory

There is one important aspect which increase

speed and accelerate the use of data in memory

concept to reduce the repeated usage of I/O sys-

tem/program calls to the same set of data. Ac-

cording to IBM, Data-In-Memory enables indi-

vidual jobs/applications to run much faster by

reducing the I/O operations and reduce the

elapsed time for the job to execute on server.

This reduction is achieved by reading/writing the

reusable or more demanding data from (or in

some cases writing to) a buffer and process it

when required directly from buffer processor sto-

rage space instead of reading tape or DASD sto-

rage.

Data-In-Memory technique will benefit us in

multiple ways and help our processing at much

faster rate:

1. The frequent read/write operations will dras-

tically reduced, and therefore the element of

elapsed time will also reduce in proportion to the

reduction in Input and Output calls.

2. The remaining Input and Output instruc-

tions/calls are done to a less busy read/write

module and on the other hand it will also offer

the remaining read write operations will execute

at faster response.

IV. OUR NEW APPROACH

IT used to have the luxury of batch windows —

time that was dedicated to doing only batch

processing. Today, however, batch windows

have slammed shut. Today’s clients look ahead

to be able to perform business at any time. That

means organization should be ready to provide

100% availability to process transactions in real

time and around the clock, leaving small time

frame for dedicated batch possessing. So how

does batch processing get completed? It must be

rightly mixed and intelligently mingled with real

time transaction processing. And you have to

manage with no batch processing interfere on

transactions and degrade their availability or per-

formance, which signifies you need to have very

logical and efficient batch processing with right

tools to support dynamic workload scheduling. A

new approach to system architecture is needed

that reduces the complexity and costs of IT busi-

ness as well as increases flexibility to accommo-

date change thru optimization [7].

Earlier, the market was not so competitive

when you were allowed to ―throw MIPS‖ at the

problem resolutions and fixing bugs. On the oth-

er hand, mainframe resources are so costly, and

all IT organizations are under immense pressure

to cut down the costs. The only way left is to op-

timize the use of mainframe technology to meet

out the enormous and increasing demands placed

on the mainframe by the business can give you

the capacity you need while still keeping costs

under control.

So how do you deliver batch service delivery

timely, and supervise costs, and build up a model

that scales with the increasing demand of your

competitive business? To accomplishing this

soaring demand it requires a holistic approach —

one that lets you optimize your batch processing.

Mainframe batch optimization and maximiz-

ing availability with saving time and cost can be

achieved by following below listed techniques:



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1. To manage from a service viewpoint, you

need a single, unified view of your production

environment. That view must show all the ser-

vices you deliver to client and all of the asso-

ciated application with their horizontal and ver-

tical service domains. It will enable you to make

decisions from a business perspective also know

as chain coordination. You can also determine

the business impact of actions before you im-

plement them, so you can take action in the pro-

duction environment with confidence and clarity

on your implementation which also helps you to

proper backup and restore system if something

goes unexpected. You also need to understand

your service level commitments agreed to the

business in terms of service availability and per-

formance else you may need to shell heavy pe-

nalties. In the process of establishing business

SLA's, it’s important to recognize and categorize

your work, in collaboration with the business

consultants, the required service level agree-

ments and the relative business priority of each

category should be properly documented and re-

viewed. Multiple IT work load automation solu-

tions and tools are available that easily monitor

and help you to manage mainframe batch

processing with respect to SLA's. An important

feature of these solutions is that they provide

early notification/warning of potential problems

that may result in breach of SLA's. It will guide

you to remediate problems/issues and even res-

tart a batch job where technical staff can priorit-

ize batch applications with high focus on resolv-

ing issues with high business impact.

Governance is also needed to ensure that the

problem which precipitated the batch optimiza-

tion never occurs again. It promises better Hard-

ware resource utilization, will also decrease of

application maintenance cost, batch schedule is

expediently arranged, advance planning that the

proposed resolution fits within the time window,

have fewer troubles with the batch it is easier for

you to do troubleshooting of any further problem

occurrence and makes it is easier to congregate

and sustain your service level agreements. This

means we can collaborate with our clients to

tackle challenges never before it is thought poss-

ible.

2. It is pointless to say, every IT organization is

under pressure to reduce cost, and that certainly

includes the mainframe batch on high radar be-

ing expensive. Eventually, it becomes essential

to optimize the batch run cycle. Major cost is

headed under day to day MIPS (million instruc-

tions per second) consumption, IBM’s capricious

work load license charges are also based on a

four-hour rolling average of million service unit

consumption (MSU's). To realize these goals

first we need to discover best suitable time for

scheduling critical batch, so high MIPS consum-

ing application should be schedule off to a lower

usage interlude, but need to be precautious about

disruption in a downstream application/batch

process and reports or feeds and obvious related

business impacting services. Also need to guar-

antee that lower priority jobs don’t exhaust off

resources from higher priority applications and

degrade system performance. Between a high-

quality capacity management solution that lets

you imagine the usage and impact to crucial ser-

vice and an intelligent workload automation so-

lution that helps you determine best fit for batch

scheduling, you can very effectively manage

usage costs.

It’s essential to scrutinize these system com-

ponents and evaluate whether they are fully

tuned up for crucial batch processing. As sug-

gested by Shintani, Y, Inoue, K, Kamada, E,

Shonai, T. that for online transaction processing

(OLTP), no configuration increased performance

more than 4%. To make the superscalar architec-

ture more effective for OLTP, it is important to

reduce execution cycles per instruction (CPI), by

reducing overhead caused by sequential

processes [14]. We can also allow or define each

job to be executed between its arrival time and

deadline by a single processor with variable

speed by following different scheduling models

[12], under the assumption that energy usage per

unit time. Below is the list of system compo-

nents which are very important during initializa-

tion/installation:



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◦ IMS subsystems

◦ CICS subsystems

◦ DB2 subsystems

◦ Virtual storage access method (VSAM)

◦ Tape drives and libraries

◦ Workload Manager (WLM) policies

◦ Transmission mechanisms

◦ Job classes and initiators

◦ Buffer management

3. Most of the time mainframe batch processing

includes updating data, extracting data, reconcil-

ing data, and reporting on the huge business data

marts stored in very large subsystems under

DB2/IMS DB and VSAM files on the main-

frame. Usually this involves the execution of

multiple batch jobs in sequence. Batch optimiza-

tion solutions available that facilitate this partic-

ular kind of overlap. Think of the time you could

save when you consider the large number of

batch jobs that can take advantage of this capa-

bility.

Another technique, known as parallel

processing, which saves additional time and

maximize availability. Here you execute mul-

tiple batch jobs concurrently on parallel proces-

sors in the mainframe and lets exploit these

time-saving methods to unleash the power of

mainframe which will shrink the time required to

run batch and increase availability of online

window.

Select jobs to fine tune key applications on an

average may have thousands of related jobs,

which makes it impractical to tune every single

job. Therefore, you should select the ones that

would be most beneficial to tune. We can use the

following criteria to help you select the jobs to

tune:

a. Processor cycles: If your challenge is to reduce

processor cycles, choose the highest processor

consuming jobs. Perhaps restrict yourself to jobs

that run at the peak of the rolling four hour aver-

age of processor consumption.

b. Critical path: The longest running critical path

jobs should be in the list. Sometimes jobs near

one of the critical paths are also valuable tuning

them, so consider those as well.

c. Similar jobs: Jobs that are similar to many

other jobs might be worth tuning. Also, if you

can easily apply the lessons learned from tuning

them to other jobs, consider adding those to the

list as well.

d. Sometimes jobs which do not initially meet

these criteria might emerge from tuning those

that do. For example, a job that writes a big data

set read by a selected job might appear as also

being having an important effect to tune. There-

fore, the list of jobs to tune can change as you go

through this process.

4. We should determine the core functional batch

alternatively there can be more than one critical

path serving different business functions, this

critical path should be given the upmost priority

and best suitable resource availability to success-

ful completion of this batch. Once this critical

path is finished than the online point can be

flagged green and the reporting, back-up applica-

tions can run simultaneously giving the highest

availability to customers.

5. Special recommendation should be achieved

by learning deadlock possibilities in business

functionality. Almost any situation in which

processes can be granted exclusive access to

some resources (e.g. dedicated I/O devices) has

potential for deadlock. Alternatively, we must

consider a preemptive and non-preemptive sche-

duling model as one of the advanced scheduling

problems considered by a constraint program-

ming techniques [9]. Below are the four condi-

tions required for deadlock, which should be

kept in solution phase to avoid contention issue,

prevent it by negating one of these four neces-

sary conditions.

a. Mutual exclusion condition

b. Hold and wait condition

c. No pre-emption condition

d. Circular wait condition

6. You must ensure that your JCL is complete-

ly error free, as this is a basic step which should

be prioritized before scheduling in job scheduler.

JCL has the critical purpose of calculating batch



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job processing, it interrupt processing and con-

sume critical MIPS and boost batch finishing

point time and achieve online point, it may take

hours to track down and fix, hence it’s moment-

ous to verify that your JCL is error-free before

executing it, to compress the batch window.

Beyond typical JCL syntax abends, JCL imple-

mentation may have typical syntax errors that are

unique to the scheduling way out you are using.

This dedicated syntax can be very influential, but

it still needs to be validated along with the stan-

dard JCL syntax.

JCL has dependencies on organization’s data

center structure and infrastructure environment.

This environment is extremely dynamic, and

changes can cause tribulations in JCL. So focus

on doing more than just verifying your JCL pri-

marily. JCL verification/pre-check solutions are

available that can perform all types of verifica-

tion/authentication described above.

7. Explore parallel execution of additional

streams which exploits powerful mainframe

server and provides all prospect to optimize

mainframe batch, illustrate and analyze the in-

ternal and external dependency charts/graphs and

try to diminish or avoid the redundant dependen-

cies. Before tuning up any job person should per-

form three kinds of analysis:

a. Find the longest running steps or program log-

ic and

tune them individually.

b. Examine the inter-step dependencies and as-

sess whether

they can be eliminated, splitting the job into

separate logical

function or goals where ever possible.

c. Scrutinize the inter-job dependencies and wait

situation

and strive to eliminate them, adjusting the batch

schedule

as appropriate.

d. If your goal is to reduce processor cycle con-

sumption, the tuning of long-running steps is the

only approach needed; splitting jobs or removing

inter-job dependencies will not help.

7. Monthly or quarterly there should be technic-

al and

functional review to track detailed information

such as the cause of the job failures, after seek-

ing for a temporary fix there should be a investi-

gation on the failure with the 5 Whys (developed

by Saki chi Toyoda) is an iterative question-

asking technique to explore the root cause-and-

effect relationships underlying a particular prob-

lem. There should a solution team explicitly hav-

ing a dedicated role for permanent resolution of

batch error fixing. Sometimes it may happen that

the application/job which is failing does not ex-

plains the exact reason of failure but the prede-

cessor application holds the real rationale which

should be deeply analyzed and dig in for exact

root cause analysis together with SME’s and

business, which will help to promote stable

batch environment with zero abends. Also look

more towards Check pointing and Failure Re-

covery methods and demonstrate how to avoid

the permanent loss of business function [4].

Job Name System CPU

Elapsed

M/S Remarks

PABD010 DB2 00:45:11 00:01:11

File not

available,

simple res-

tart

PABM090 DB2 00:10:19 00:12:19

Duplicate

data entry

XABD020

IMS-

DB 01:34:22 00:04:22

Check point

restart

XDCD010

IMS-

DB 03:22:33 00:22:33

Step100:

PORG

Stock need

to be tuned.

SDTVY01 DB2 23:44:23 00:02:00

Need Re-

indexing &

Re-

organization

XFVW010

IMS-

DB 02:11:24 00:11:24

Parentage

not set

CT010T01 CICS 00:00:04 00:00:01

Transaction

abended

8. Repeated efforts should be made for batch op-

timization

identification as it can yield us better ways to cut

the cost on burning MIPS usage. Assuming a



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phase of batch-demanding work, you can refrain

the components in particular for batch. Here are

the few traditions to fine tune batch are men-

tioned below:

a. Altering the DB2 buffer pools to support

chronological processing. Batch often has a more

sequential data access pattern than other work-

loads.

b. Ever-increasing the buffer pool dimension to

take benefit of the lower demand for memory in

the batch window. On the other hand, this might

not always apply because many installations

keep other applications available all the way

through the batch window.

c. It also requires provisioning more processor

capacity or power to trim down queuing or pro-

visioning more memory to prevent paging de-

fault.

d. Altering Logical Partition (LPAR) weights to

support the LPAR policies where batch runs.

This might be a manual course of action, or In-

telligent Resource Director (IRD) might be

without human intervention shift weights be-

tween various LPAR’s.

e. Ensuring DB2 or other cataloguing bandwidth

is tolerable for the batch peak. In this way it will

also not conflict with other user logging necessi-

ties, which might actually be higher than that of

the scheduled batch.

f. Switching Work load manager policies to fa-

vor batch scheduling. To achieve this, some in-

stallations have diverse WLM policies for over-

night and daytime batch processing.

9. Report review and customization as

per Client requirements, there is always a chance

to review and later on customize the report gen-

eration as per requirements. Also there can be a

scope to customize daily reporting stuffs to

weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. As per

business need if something is less important can

be produced on specialized on demand batches

where and when required by business, it will

save a significant number of MIPS and will also

save time of batch run cycle which will increase

online window. After the technical strategy is set

and there is an understanding of the batch land-

scape, you can derive detailed optimization ac-

tions to implement cost saving strategies as

small projects.

10. On long term progressive planning land-

scape, business should also think of decommis-

sioning of any unused application, it will allow

us to free the unused costly infrastructure (serv-

ers or components) or replace more CPU con-

suming batch applications with new logical in-

terface providing same kind of results, sometime

we need to standardize working platform and

proficiently use the limited resources. Also we

should think of early alarming modules to

achieve critical bench marks alternately it will

provide technical staff a better chance to avoid

major failures or circumvent show stoppers.

V. ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY

Our methodology is the systematic, theoretical

and practical analysis of the methods applied to

analyze and tune batch processing is an abstract

methodology that can be applied to batch

processing independent of technology platform.

This platform unbiased approach can also be ap-

plied to batch applications that cross over a

number of operating environments, a characteris-

tic of many installations nowadays. We can use

stepladder specific to IBM Z servers to demon-

strate how to implement the methodology. At a

high level, this methodology consists of three

phases namely initialization, analysis and im-

plementation as described below:

1 Initialization

Initialization is a key segment of any venture,

especially one as multifaceted as a batch window

reduction mission. In this phase, you must cate-

gorize a clear scope for the mission to take ad-

vantage of the likelihood of success. Several

characteristic of this phase comprise of:

a.) Investigate the problem to its root.

b.) Comprehend the business problem and its

conversion to a technical problem and functional

relation.

c.) Excellent governance model.



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d.) Establish a formal process for making deci-

sions and fundamental expectations on a conti-

nuous business needs.

Our objectives is to understand the business

problems and how this translates into a technical

and functional understanding, set reasonable ob-

jectives and identify the benefits of the elucida-

tion, identify and define the measurement miles-

tones, collect data and essential information spe-

cifically needed for the mainframe batch sche-

dule, define roles and responsibilities of the par-

ticipants and as a final point attempt to setup op-

timization project, such as documenting tasks,

defining required activities, solution document,

document of understanding, statement of work,

metrics going to use while in next phases,

project tailoring guideline, review checklist and

so on.

Governance for our batch schedule project.

2. Analyses

The analysis phase defines a set of logical and

focused procedures that will be implemented lat-

er. This analytic module consists of three steps:

A. Strategy and Planning

In this stage, you can recognize system environ-

ment and any technical or functional constraints.

Do not produce any optimization measures that

have a variance with each other. The approach is

composed of seven key themes:

Ensuring the system environment is correct-

ly configured and verify system configuration to

ensure that there are enough processor cycles.

Implementing Data In Memory – smart buf-

fer space utilization.

Optimizing Input/outputs operation han-

dling.

Increasing parallel processing solutions.

Decreasing failures impact – handling show

stoppers situation.

Increasing operational effectiveness effi-

ciently.

Improving application output efficiency.

B. Understanding the critical batch landscape

Most batch environments are extremely critical

and complex, typically with hundreds of thou-

sands of applications, jobs, files, and database

objects with large number of input/output opera-

tions. Complexity is the biggest obstruction to

administrate on time batch issue handling. A

number of tools and mainframe utilities are

available that can assist to control this intricacy.

Moreover several system and critical batch sche-

duling with multiple interfaces makes it more

complex, it can be very difficult to gain a good

technical and functional understanding of the

batch landscape.

In this stage it is important to determine what

business need to be optimized and what kind of

benefits can be reaped from this implementation.

The organization needs to fully understand their

batch processing, so a review of the batch is

possible. Some examples of components that

must be verified and reviewed are as listed be-

low:

Standard naming conventions should be en-

forced and promoted.

Functionality and business object of batch

Job and applications must be well understood

and documented.

Application ownership and responsibilities

must be clearly marked.

While granting access to every database ob-

ject must be identified and grouped.

Critical path of batch and end points must be

identified as milestones, can be termed as online

point.

Batch reliability must be assessed and scru-

tinized time to time and opportunities to make



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the most of it must be intended with proper ap-

proach.

Job elapsed time and execution time with

resource consumption details must be tracked

down and fully understood because it can vary

with your daily critical ongoing business transac-

tions load.

C. Deriving comprehensive optimization im-

plementation plan

To determine the job-level optimization meas-

ures to implement, scrutinize the jobs in detail;

follow a similar approach for all other compo-

nents. The following tasks are some situations of

optimization actions you can take:

1. Examine the times of the job steps and then

review file access for the major steps.

2. Review and fine tune the database system

buffer pools.

3. Check for correct referential integrity.

4. Scheduled re-indexing and perform update

on run stats information.

Also inspect and enhance the server processing

swiftness.

3 Implementation

Implementation of any batch optimization

project is very analogous, at a high level, to any

other projects, so there is no need to assess the

standard components here. However, some con-

siderations specific to batch optimization

projects, including the following:

1. The size of a batch project can be different

from other implementation projects. The scale of

a batch optimization can be very large because

many changes too many components all together

it becomes big enhancement instead of simple

business as usual change, such as program mod-

ules and databases re-alignment, might be essen-

tial. In addition, if there are major changes re-

quired in the current business functionality and

there are more prospective changes required to

synchronize the recent projects will take us to-

wards new functionality which in turn can have

business impact on the entire organization.

2. Normally, there is a need for system testing,

environment testing, user acceptance testing, but

some required changes can be difficult to test

and verify results with test data. Testing whether

a change continues to permit a logical program,

such as a batch component, to function appro-

priately is usually simple. However, testing and

narrating the impact of performing a change on

the overall batch environment is much more

complex. Also very tedious to predict the nature

of change in real time environment before im-

plementing the change in production we should

first implement it in test environment which are

more like production and analyze their impact

for around a week test batches before promoting

them to production environment with the prox-

imity to fallback and proper backup strategy.

3. To implement batch optimization projects we

may require a various kind of specialized skills,

for example skilled programmers, database ad-

ministrators, automation experts, system plat-

form experts, workload schedulers, operations

specialist or application developers. But to be

precise, which skills are needed to implement

real project can not be determined until the com-

prehensive tasks are identified and documented.

Here we evaluate few z/OS specific examples for

each listed approach:

1. Make sure that the system is appropriately

configured. Make sure that the LPAR where the

batch runs has enough memory and buffer space

and that the Workload Manager (WLM) setup is

appropriate for kind of batch, we need to sche-

dule with its forecasted frequency.

2. Implement Data In Memory



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Implement sufficient buffering of DB2 index

spaces and table spaces and use the Virtual Sto-

rage Access Method (VSAM) with Local Shared

Resources (LSR) buffering adequately and inline

to business goals.

3. Optimize Input-Output operations

Mount an adequate amount of disk Input-output

bandwidth and use chronological data striping

appropriately.

4. Increase parallel processing approach

Break multistep jobs into separate independent

jobs and use Batch Pipes/MVS (Pipes) to allow

those steps to run parallel to each other.

5. Shrink the impact of batch failures

Use an ICETOOL VERIFY step to scan a dis-

gracefully unreliable data set and only run the

main processing step if the ICETOOL declares it

to be crystal clean. On the other hand, a more

strategic solution is to fix the root causes of data

corruption and find its origin.

6. Increase operational effectiveness

If we use available scheduler functions to auto-

mate the batch application it will provide ready

support to all these scheduling issues via sche-

duling tools available like CA7, TWS, Zeke,

Control M.

7. Improve application efficiency

Use Application Performance Analyzer for z/OS

(APA) to tune the application program code.

VI. CONCLUSIONS

Mainframe batch optimization can be achieved

in number of ways. This paper states some tech-

niques to reduce cost and optimize mainframe

batch processing. We are putting up various op-

tions which can help us to optimize our existing

mainframe batch environment which can reduce

the MSU cost for the organization. Another ob-

servation is that although we look at optimizing

the batch stream, we should also consider mul-

tiple options however they might not be very

huge or attractive at first sight, but it really value

to your business and if you the return over a pe-

riod of 5 years, it’s a huge saving.

Success in optimization of a batch workload is

achieved more through closely controlled and

consistent use of the methods/processes

adopted.. The key feature is to link the savings

generated in terms of CPU MIPS and expressive

to business in terms of potential cost savings

generated by the optimization of mainframe

batch over a period of time. Milestone jobs are

identified that are critical to the business and

must not miss their deadlines. The promotion

algorithm uses the WLM integration technique

which will promote jobs on the critical paths that

are late as per schedule and might affect the on-

line point.

If business operation is critical for your business

value and must complete by the set deadline, you

must specify that operation to be considered as

the target of a critical path. Then during daily

plan processing, a critical path that includes the

internal and external predecessors of the target

operation is calculated, and a specific dependen-

cy schedule is created. While the current plan is

running in scheduler, monitor the critical paths

that are consuming their slack time and, these

become more critical than the paths calculated

during planning phase. A proper allocation of

resources to tasks enables the organization to

achieve its planned objective and by these objec-

tives we can support our business financial port-

folio and helps to empower IT innovation by op-

timization which is a doorstep opportunity to

maximize availability, save time, cost and max-

imizing organizations throughput with increase

customer satisfaction with increased online

availability of applications 24x7x365, which it-

self means increase in business and confidence

in market and company stakeholder.

VII. References

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Kaneki,,Martin PackerBatch Processing in a

Parallel Sysplex‖, http://www. red-

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