Cognos 8 Three Tiered Architecture

Cognos 8 Three Tiered Architecture

 

The Cognos 8 BI can be considered to be separated into a 3 tier architecture layout.

 

1^st tier – Web Server

2^nd tier – Applications

3^rd tier – Data

 

The tiers are based on component function, and are normally separated by firewalls.  The C8 user interface rests above the tiers.  Primarily, the communication between the tier components is based on the both the SOAP and HTTP protocols.  Third party applications can use either a URL API or the SOAP API.  The SOAP API uses the BI Bus to move information from one service to another by moving the packets of data.

 

The 1^st tier (Web Server) hosts the Cognos gateway, which: encrypts and decrypts passwords; extracts information needed to submit the request to a Cognos BI server; attaches environment variables for the Web server; adds a default namespace to the request to help ensure that the server authenticates the user in the correct namespace; and passes requests to a Cognos 8 BI dispatcher for processing.

 

The 2^nd tier (Applications) hosts the Cognos 8 BI server and its associated services.  It is comprised of: Application Tier Components, Content Manager, and Bootstrap service.

 

The 3^rd tier (Data) contains the Content Store, Data Sources, Metric Store