The IBM Cognos 8 platform delivers the right capabilities to manage the solution with centralized and Web-based administration that provides a complete view of Cognos activity as well as metrics and thresholds to resolve potential issues before they impact business. The IBM Cognos 8 platform is built on Web-based service oriented architecture (SOA), designed for scalability, availability and openness. This n-tiered solution has three tiers: Web, application and data. The tiers, based on business function, are typically separated by network firewalls.
When considering deployment options, reliability and scalability should be key considerations. Services in the application tier operate on a peer-to-peer basis. That means, in effect, that no service is more important; there is no "master" service. Any service of the same type, on any machine in an IBM Cognos 8 platform configuration, is capable of servicing an incoming request. The result is complete fault tolerance: any server in the system can route and handle any request. Request dispatching is done in an optimal way: with automatic load balancing built into the system.
The IBM Cognos 8 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 leverages 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 of these different data providers. The IBM Cognos 8 BI user interfaces are accessed via the Web tier.
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Satish P
