IBM Cognos BI delivers a broad range of business intelligence capabilities on an open, enterprise-class

platform. All capabilities—including viewing, creating and administering dashboards, reports, analysis,
scorecards, and events—are accessed through web interfaces. The IBM Cognos Platform delivers the
capabilities to manage business intelligence applications with centralized, web-based administration
that provides a complete view of system activity as well as system metrics and thresholds so that
organizations can resolve potential issues before there is a business impact. The IBM Cognos Platform is
built on a web-based service-oriented-architecture (SOA) that is designed for scalability, availability, and
openness. This n-tiered architecture is made up of three server tiers: The web tier The application tier
The data tier The tiers are based on business function and can be separated by network firewalls.
Reliability and scalability were key considerations when designing the IBM Cognos Platform. Services in
the application tier operate on a peer-to-peer basis, which means that no service is more important and
that there are loose service linkages. Any service of the same type, on any machine in an IBM Cognos
Platform configuration, can satisfy an incoming request, which results in complete fault tolerance. The
dispatching (or routing) of requests is done in an optimal way, with automatic load balancing built into
the system. The IBM Cognos Platform provides optimized access to all data sources, including relational
data sources and online analytical processing (OLAP), with a single query service. In addition, this query
service understands and takes advantage of the data source strength by using a combination of open
standards such as SQL99, native SQL, and native MDX to optimize data retrieval for all these different
data providers. The IBM Cognos BI user interfaces are accessed through the web tier. Chapter 2.
Overview of the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence architecture 11 Figure 2-1 illustrates a typical tiered
deployment of the IBM Cognos Platform. Figure 2-1 Typical distributed topology for the IBM Cognos
Platform 2.1.1 IBM Cognos Platform server roles To ensure optimal performance, IBM Cognos Platform
services are normally grouped together to fulfill certain roles within a distributed deployment for
business intelligence applications. These server roles also define the tier within the architecture that an
IBM Cognos BI server uses. Web tier: The IBM Cognos Gateway The web tier provides user session
connectivity to IBM Cognos BI applications. The IBM Cognos components that fulfill this role are referred
to as the IBM Cognos Gateway. The IBM Cognos Gateway component manages all web communication
for the IBM Cognos Platform. The workload on the IBM Cognos Gateway server requires minimal
processing resources. For high availability or scalability Data Source OLAP IBM Cognos Content Store
Security Namespace Security Namespace Security Namespace IBM Cognos Gateway Dispatcher IBM
Cognos Report Server Dispatcher IBM Cognos Report Server Dispatcher IBM Cognos Content Manager
Data Tier Firewall/Router/Encryption Application Tier Firewall/Router/Encryption Presentation/Web Tier
12 IBM Cognos Business Intelligence V10.1 Handbook requirements, you can deploy multiple redundant
gateways along with an external HTTP load-balancing router. Application tier: Server components The
application tier for the IBM Cognos Platform is made up of three main server components: IBM Cognos
Dispatcher IBM Cognos Report Server IBM Cognos Content Manager Application tier servers are
composed of a collection of loosely-coupled Java™ and C++ services. IBM Cognos Dispatcher IBM Cognos
Dispatcher performs the load balancing of requests at the application tier. The IBM Cognos Dispatcher
component is a lightweight Java servlet that manages (and provides communication between)
application services. At startup, each IBM Cognos Dispatcher registers locally available services with the
IBM Cognos Content Manager. During the normal operation of IBM Cognos BI services, requests are load
balanced across all available services using a configurable, weighted round-robin algorithm to distribute
requests. You can tune the performance of IBM Cognos Platform by defining how IBM Cognos
Dispatcher handles requests and manages services. Threads within IBM Cognos Platform are managed
by the type of traffic that they handle, which is referred to as high and low affinity. Affinity relates to the
report service process that handled the original user request when multiple interactions need to occur
to satisfy the request. High-affinity connections are used to process absolute and high-affinity requests
from the report services. Low-affinity connections are used to process low-affinity requests. A high
affinity request is a transaction that can gain a performance benefit from a previously processed request
by accessing cache. It can be processed on any service, but resource consumption is minimized if the
request is routed back to the report service process that was used to execute the original process. A low
affinity request operates just as efficiently on any service. IBM Cognos configuration: A normal
configuration for IBM Cognos Dispatcher is two IBM Cognos Report Server processes (see “IBM Cognos
Report Server” on page 13) per allocated processor and eight to 10 threads per processor in one of the
following configurations: Three low affinity threads plus one high affinity thread Four low affinity
threads plus one high affinity thread Chapter 2. Overview of the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence
architecture 13 You can manage the number of threads per IBM Cognos BI reporting service process
through the IBM Cognos Platform administration console by setting the number of high- and low-affinity
connections. For more details, refer to the IBM Cognos BI Architecture and Deployment Guide IBM
Cognos Report Server The main service that is responsible for application-tier processing is the report or
query service (often referred to as the BIBus processes). IBM Cognos Dispatcher starts IBM Cognos
Report Server processes dynamically as needed to handle the request load. An administrator can specify
the maximum number of processes that these services can start, as well as the minimum number of
processes that should be running at non-peak times. Configure the number of processes for IBM Cognos
Report Server based on the available processor capacity. In general, IBM Cognos BI reporting service
performance is closely tied to processor clock speed and throughput capabilities. The number of
processors in a server and their clock rates are the two primary factors to consider when planning for
additional IBM Cognos Report Server hardware capacity. For example, you generally configure a server
with four available processors to use more report service processes than a server with only two
available processors. Similarly, given two servers with an equal number of processors, configure the
server with a significantly faster processor clock rate to have more report and report-service processes.
When configuring the IBM Cognos Platform server environment, you must set a Java heap size. The IBM
Cognos BI reporting and query service is made up of two underlying components: The Java servlet-based
IBM Cognos Dispatcher services Report services that are launched using the Java Native Interface (JNI)
Set the Java virtual machine (JVM) heap-size allocation for IBM Cognos Platform so that Java memory is
only as large as is necessary to accommodate the processing requirements of the Java based services.
This setting ensures that as much memory as possible is available to the IBM Cognos Report Service,
which is not Java. You can determine the optimal Java heap size using Java garbage collection statistics.
14 IBM Cognos Business Intelligence V10.1 Handbook IBM Cognos Content Manager IBM Cognos
Content Manager is the IBM Cognos Platform service that manages the storage of the following
customer application data: Security settings and configurations Server configuration settings Packages
Dashboards Metrics Report specifications Report output You use IBM Cognos Content Manager to
publish models, retrieve or store report specifications, handle scheduling information and manage the
IBM Cognos security name space. IBM Cognos Content Manager maintains information in a relational
database that is referred to as the content store database. A minimum of one IBM Cognos Content
Manager service is required for each IBM Cognos Platform implementation. Content Manager
performance can benefit from the availability of high-speed RAM resources and typically requires one
processor for every four processors that are allocated for IBM Cognos Report Server processing.