With CA 7, what is NCF and when should it be used?

Products

• CA 7 Workload Automation

Issue/Introduction

This document describes the CA 7 component NCF and its use.

Resolution

CA 7 component NCF is designed to track NJE'ed jobs; jobs that are routed between SYSPLEXs that do not have shared DASD. It is often desirable, for maximizing use and effectiveness of computer resources, to route CPU jobs to some other data centers for processing, printing, and so forth. Generally, these data centers are widely dispersed geographically. They may be located very close to each other. In any case, routing of jobs is performed by JES over a communications link between the data centers. This is accomplished with JES control statements included within the JCL for the job. In order to track these types of job (submitted by CA 7 to run on in a different SYSPLEX with no shared DASD), you must use the CA 7 NCF component.

If you are routing jobs between LPARS that do have shared DASD, you do not need to use NCF. In that case, you would have the UCC7CMDS file (Communications Data Set) on shared DASD and start an ICOM on the receiving LPAR pointing to this file.