Flux File Orchestration Platform

Highlights

Managed File Transfer

Simplify and reduce your staff's duties. Instead of your staff retrieving and sending business critical files, Flux can automate the retrieving and sending of files to your clients, vendors, and business partners. Flux managed file transfer reduces errors and improves timeliness over manual methods.

Automated Workflows

Create automated workflows using a powerful state machine model. Define workflow steps that contain conditional branching, dependencies, looping, parallelism, splits, and joins. Visualize your workflows to transfer files and orchestrate Web Services and business intelligence applications like ETL Tools.

Web Services and SOA

With Web Services and SOA, your business processes can communicate with, send requests to, and receive information from a variety of networked and online services. Flux can simplify the creation and monitoring of your business processes that use Web Services.

ETL Tool Integration

You retrieve data from your business partners, but it's not always in the right format for your business processes. By integrating ETL (extract, transform, load) tools into your business processes, your data arrives in the right place in the right format for your business processes. Flux can orchestrate and manage these processes, providing your staff with increased reliability and a simpler IT infrastructure.

Managed File Transfer

Extensive FTP, SFTP, and FTPS Support

Flux supports file watching and file transfer jobs and workflows that use:

• FTP
• SFTP (also called Secure FTP and SSH FTP)
• FTPS (also called FTP-SSL and FTP-over-SSL)
• SFTP private key files
• FTPS server and client certificates
• TLS, SSL, and implicit SSL encryption protocols for FTPS
• Passive/Active mode
• Binary/ASCII mode

Watch for Inbound Files

Watch for incoming files that arrive via FTP, Secure FTP, FTP-SSL, the local file system, or a UNC network share. You can wait until the files arrive completely to avoid processing incompletely transferred files. Once your files arrive, process them within your job or workflow.

Streaming Server-to-Server File Copies

When copying files from FTP/SFTP/FTPS server to another, Flux streams the file so that it is written to disk only on the target FTP server. By not writing a temporary copy of the file, the file transfer is faster and does not occupy disk space on the intermediary server, where the Flux engine runs.

Issue FTP Commands Directly to Server

For issuing non-standard commands that only your FTP server supports or for fine-grained control over your FTP server, you can issue FTP commands directly to your FTP server within a job or workflow.

Change File Permissions

If your FTP server supports it, you can change file permissions on files on your FTP server. This chmod behavior is not part of the FTP specification and may work on one FTP server but not another.

Web Services (SOA) Integration

Call REST Services

Use Flux to invoke REST services from your jobs and workflows:

• Invoke Restful resources over HTTP using the standard verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE)
• Access SSL secured web sites
• Supports HTML form processing, basic authentication, and the ability to set HTTP headers
• Perform XPath query operations on the response XML

Call Web Services

Similar in nature to REST services, Web services can be called from jobs and workflows. Use Flux to:

• Invoke Web services (SOAP/HTTP) defined using WSDL
• Supports WS-Security basic authentication
• Simplifes integration in an SOA environment

Pass Data In and Out

Pass job data into REST and Web services. Pull data from REST and Web services into your jobs and workflows for processing.

Security

Use the security mechanisms built into REST and Web services like SSL support, key stores, and trust stores.

Database Integration

Call Stored Procedures

From within your jobs and workflows, call stored procedures defined in local or remote databases. Pass data in to your stored procedures. Pass the results through to the next step in your workflow.

Issue Queries

Issue database queries against local or remote databases and process the results within your workflow.

Perform Database Updates and Inserts

Update existing data or add new rows to your tables in your local and remote databases.

Pass Job Data to Database Calls

Use the information retrieved or generated within your job or workflow and pass it through to your database calls.

Retrieve Data and Pass to Job

Query your databases and pass the data through to your jobs for processing.

Automate Java Tasks

Automate, Orchestrate Java

Your Java tasks automated and orchestrated in Flux. Use Flux's managed file transfer and web services capabilities to orchestrate the batch running of your Java tasks.

Pipeline Files to Your Java Tasks

When files appear on FTP servers or file systems, securely copy them into position and pipeline them to your Java tasks.

Java <-> Cloud

Schedule your Java tasks and transmit the output to cloud services using Flux's support for Web Services (SOA). Or, gather your inputs from the cloud and feed them to your Java tasks.

Java EE and Java SE Supported

Flux supports Java EE and Java SE environments with Java and REST APIs.

Single Point of Control

Monitor Everything from Your Web Browser

Using Flux's web-based Operations Console, watch over and monitor all your jobs, workflows, and file transfers. Designed for the needs of Operations Staff but usable by developers too.

Near Real-Time Updates

The Flux Operations Console uses automated, asynchronous, Ajax-style technology to keep your browser window updated with the status of all your Flux activities, automatically updated in near real-time.

Watch File Transfers in Real-Time

Watch file transfers taking place from within jobs and workflows. Monitor file transfer statistics like source and destination hosts, file transfer protocol, transfer rate, and estimated time remaining.

Monitor 500,000+ Jobs, Workflows, and File Transfers Simultaneously

The Flux Operations Console can monitor 500 000+ jobs, workflows, and file transfers, all at the same time.

Reduce Errors with Visual Workflow Design

Visual Design

Design your jobs and workflows using a drag-and-drop visual interface, right in your web browser. Integrated into the Flux Operations Console. No need to install a desktop client.

Drag and Drop

Design jobs and workflows using drag-and-drop. Right in your web browser.

See your Job Dependencies

Look at your job dependencies and workflow dependencies, all within the browser.

Programming Not Required

To design multi-step jobs and workflows — complete with dependencies, conditional branching, and looping — you don't need to be a software developer. (But if you want to use Flux's full Java API, you can.)

Security

Granular Access Controls

Assign more than 30 different, fine-grained user security controls to permit or restrict access to various portions of your workflows. For your operations staff, set privileges and customize tabs in the Flux Operations Console to increase security and efficiency.

LDAP and Active Directory

Flux can tap into your organization's LDAP and Active Directories for single sign-on purposes.

Security in Operations Console and Java APIs

Flux's security mechanisms are visible in the Operations Console, the Java APIs, and the command line interface.

Disable Security Optionally

Some environments, especially when Flux is embedded in Java applications, don't need any kind of security. With a configuration option set appropriately, all Flux security is disabled.

Automated Workflows

Powerful State Machine

Define simple or intricate automated workflows using a powerful state machine model. Define workflow steps that contain conditional branching, dependencies, looping, parallelism, splits, and joins. Perform tasks and wait for events to occur within your workflow.

Scalability

Scale individual workflows to 500 steps. Run thousands of workflows across a cluster of Flux workflow engines. Invoke other workflows from within workflows.

Error Handling

Errors occur in workflows. When they do, you can define simple or detailed mechanisms to handle them. Handling errors can be fully automated or call out to people to take corrective actions.

Dependencies on Other Workflows and Files on FTP Servers

Create workflows that depend on other workflows. Wait for other workflows to reach milestones or to finish altogether. Create workflows that depend on and watch for files on FTP servers to arrive or change

Error Recovery that Minimizes Downtime

When Something Goes Wrong

React accordingly when a process errors out or a file transfer fails. Configure automated responses to errors or call out for human attention. Error handlers can be complex workflows in and of themselves.

Automated and Manual Error Recovery

At any point in a job, define automated or manual error handlers to resolve, retry, or report the situation.

Sophisticated Error Handling

Flux's error handlers can be defined in terms of a workflow, allowing you to create sophisticated error recovery mechanisms.

Reuse Error Handlers

Error handlers can be defined once and used throughout a single job or throughout an entire collection of jobs.

Automate Unique Resources on Your Network

Agents

Using a Flux Agent on a remote computer, watch for files on remote computers, copy files to and from agents, and run processes those agents.

Take Advantage of Special Resources

Sometimes, a process needs to run on a specific computer that contains unique resources. Install a Flux Agent on that computer and run tasks on that computer using Flux.

Pools

You can define a group of computers into a pool, and then schedule processes to run on any one of the machines in that pool.

Agentless Scheduling

Sometimes, you don't want to install special agent software on your computers. Flux supports so-called agentless scheduling that uses SSH to run processes on remote machines.

Scalability and High Availability

Clustering and Failover

To provide high availability and increased throughput, Flux can be clustered on two to eight servers. There is no single point of failure in the cluster. If one server goes down, that server's duties are automatically and seamlessly moved to the other servers in the cluster.

High Availability

There is no single point of failure. All servers in the cluster cooperate equally to increase the system's overall throughput even in the event of server failure.

Load Balancing

Flux automatically spreads the task load out across all the servers in the cluster. Less busy servers receive new work before busier servers. In jobs and workflows that contain parallelism, different parts of the same workflow can run simultaneously on different servers in the cluster.

Use Flux to spread your workflows out among a cluster of high available servers. You get scalability and resiliency.

Scale to 100,000+ Jobs

Scale to many thousands of jobs and workflows.

Heterogeneous Environments

Multi-Platform

Flux runs on a very wide variety of hardware and operating systems. Flux is developed in Java using a single code base. When a new Flux version is released, all features are available on all supported platforms.

Mainframes, Big Iron, PCs, Laptops

Flux runs well on small computers up to big servers and mainframes. Flux customers run Flux on very wide variety on production hardware.

Lightweight

Flux does not consume much processor, memory, or hard drive space. Flux runs equally well on laptops, workstations, multi-core enterprise-class servers, and mainframes.

Windows, Linux, z/OS, Whatever

Flux runs on just about any operating system with a modern Java runtime environment — Windows, Linux, z/OS, Solaris, et cetera.

Audit Trail

Know What Job or Workflow Ran and When

Run reports to determine what tasks, steps, actions, jobs, and workflows executed within a specified time frame.

Filtering

Filter reports on different criteria. Filter on:

• job names
• dates and times of events
• message content
• the Flux engine where events occurred

Three Kinds of Reports Available

Flux includes three different kinds of reports. The Audit Trail records significant events. The Run Report shows details on significant "runs" within a job. Logs show low-level details of running jobs.

Save Report to File

Save your reports to a file on your local computer.

Cloud Computing

Burstable Cloud

As service demands rise and fall, Flux can adapt. Seamlessly add more Flux servers to your cluster as demand increases. As demand decreases, remove servers. Your clients access your cloud seamlessly, regardless of the number of Flux servers running.

Increase Scalability as Needed

In your cloud (cluster), add more Flux servers during periods of high demand.

Fallback as Necessary

As your scalability and high availability needs decrease dynamically, remove Flux servers from your cloud (cluster). The remaining Flux servers continue running unaffected.