Proven Practice

High Availability in the

Application Tier
Product(s): IBM Cognos 8
Area of Interest: Infrastructure
High Availability in the Application Tier 2

Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cognos ULC (formerly Cognos Incorporated). Cognos ULC
is an IBM Company. While every attempt has been made to ensure that the
information in this document is accurate and complete, some typographical
errors or technical inaccuracies may exist. Cognos does not accept
responsibility for any kind of loss resulting from the use of information
contained in this document. This document shows the publication date. The
information contained in this document is subject to change without notice.
Any improvements or changes to the information contained in this document
will be documented in subsequent editions. This document contains
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Cognos products can be found at www.cognos.com
This document is maintained by the Best Practices, Product and Technology
team. You can send comments, suggestions, and additions to
cscogpp@ca.ibm.com .

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High Availability in the Application Tier 3

Contents
1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 4
1.1 PURPOSE .............................................................................................................. 4
2 THE IBM COGNOS 8 APPLICATION TIER ...................................................... 5
2.1 CONTENT MANAGER ................................................................................................ 6
3 FAILOVER STRATEGIES ................................................................................ 6
3.1 SOFTWARE FAILOVER ............................................................................................... 6
3.2 USING HARDWARE .................................................................................................. 9
3.3 CLUSTER COMPATIBLE SETTING ................................................................................ 10

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1 Introduction
1.1 Purpose
When designing a IBM Cognos 8 implementation, consideration must be paid
as to how important high availability is. For example, a system that prints
marketing correspondence as scheduled batch jobs can probably afford to be
off-line for a number of hours without unduly affecting business operations.
Conversely, an on-line reporting system used by call centre staff to call up
customer records while speaking with clients will require high availability.

Every tier within a IBM Cognos 8 environment has the potential to be the
point of failure for the system – accordingly each tier has strategies to enable
operation to continue should a single component fail. This document is an
overview to providing fail over capabilities for the application tier in IBM
Cognos 8.

Web Tier

Application Tier

Data Tier

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2 The IBM Cognos 8 Application Tier

The Application tier of IBM Cognos 8 is where the majority of the processing
is performed. Components of the Application Tier receive user requests from
the Web Server or external applications via the SDK and must fulfil them
appropriately. In turn, the Application Tier will often have to query the data
tier in the form of SQL requests in order to obtain data for prompts, reports
etc.

The services running in the Application tier are listed in IBM Cognos
Configuration on each Server. Specific services can be enabled or disabled.

All the services are installed on each server that had Application Tier
Components selected at install time and multiple versions can be running at
the same time for failover and performance benefits.
More details of the individual services are available in the Architecture and
Planning Guide that comes with IBM Cognos 8.

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2.1 Content Manager

The one service that can be installed completely standalone is Content
Manager. This differs from the other services in that multiple Content
Managers cannot be running in an active state at the same time. Instead,
any additional Content Manager services will be running in standby mode and
will not become active unless the primary Content Manager is no longer
available for some reason. This means there is no performance benefit to
having multiple Content Managers running – all requests will always go to the
single active Content Manager.

3 Failover Strategies
In order to ensure that the Application Tier is not the point of failure for a
IBM Cognos 8 install, multiple servers running duplicate services are used to
introduce redundancy into the system. This has the additional benefit of
aiding performance as the duplicate services can be running concurrently,
processing multiple requests in parallel (with the exception of Content
Manager). As previously mentioned, the Application Tier will be carrying out
much of the processing in a IBM Cognos 8 environment, so being able to load
balance at this level is a fundamental requirement of the architecture.
Accordingly, much of the complexity of handling multiple services is hidden
from the IBM Cognos 8 administrator, with the services registering
themselves with the Content Manager and automatically becoming available
for use when coming on-line.
However, some configuration changes may be required depending on the
specific failover strategy chosen.

3.1 Software Failover

IBM Cognos 8 is architected to enable failover with no specific hardware
requirements. As mentioned above, running multiple services will cause them
to automatically register themselves within the IBM Cognos 8 environment.
Should one of the servers running IBM Cognos 8 become unavailable,
requests will no longer be sent to it and the remaining servers will continue
the work.
This works well for routing requests inside the Application Tier, but at point
new requests need to be made from outside – typically the IBM Cognos 8
gateway from the Web Tier. If the gateway is configured against a single
Application Tier server (for example app1 in the diagram below) and this is
the server that fails, then although the application still has the resources
available to run, the gateway requests would fail because its entry point into
the Application Tier is no longer available.

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Web Tier

Application Tier

app1

app4 app2

app3

To get around this potential point of failure, any Gateway servers can be
configured to be aware of any of the servers in the Application Tier by
providing a list under Dispatcher URIs for gateway in IBM Cognos
Configuration.

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If the first Dispatcher in the list is not responding, the Gateway will move on
to the next and so on. Providing redundancy at this level removes this as a
point of failure.

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3.2 Using Hardware

The same point of failure between the Web tier and Application tier
addressed above by providing a list of Dispatcher to the Gateway at
configuration time may be addressed in a different way by utilizing a
hardware router / load balancer. Instead of configuring a list of Dispatchers
running on different servers, a single router’s address is specified. The router
then passes the requests on the Application tier servers which it will have
been configured to know should be available.

An advantage to using a hardware router is that they can often be configured

to continuously poll the servers specified in the Application tier to ensure they
are still active. At a basic level, this involves checking the server is still
online. In addition to this, it is also possible to check a specific URI
(<server>/p2pd/servlet/ping) within IBM Cognos 8 to ensure the Application
is still running. In contrast, depending on the Gateway method implemented
(.cgi, ISAPI, Apache Mod etc.), software only load-balancing may cause the
gateway to not know that a Dispatcher is unavailable until a request has been
generated.

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3.3 Cluster Compatible Setting

By default, software load balancing is enabled for requests within the
Application tier. If a hardware router is being used that handles the load
balancing then it may be preferred to turn this off. The setting is called Load
balancing mode and is applied at the Dispatcher level. Two settings are
available Weighted Round Robin (default) and Cluster Compatible.

Changing to Cluster Compatible will direct the Dispatcher to execute

requests locally if the service is available (on the same server as the
Dispatcher) and the request has not been directed to a specific server (high
and absolute affinity requests). It should only be used where the load
balancing has been performed already, for example by a hardware load-
balancer or in software, such as the IBM WebSphere web server plug-in.

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