400 Solving Operational Business Intelligence with InfoSphere Warehouse Advanced Edition
The tiers are based on business function and can be separated by network
firewalls. Figure 11-1 shows the overall architecture.
Figure 11-1 IBM Cognos Platform architecture
The main components of this architecture are described here.
Web tier: 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 requirements, you can deploy multiple redundant gateways along with
an external HTTP load balancing router.
Application tier: 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
Presentation/Web Tier
Application Tier
Data Tier
IBM Cognos
Gateway
IBM Cognos
Content
Manager
Dispatcher
IBM Cognos
Report
Server
Dispatcher
IBM Cognos
Report
Server
Dispatcher
Security
Namespace
IBM Cognos
Content
Store
Data
Source
OLAP
Firewall/Router/Encryption
Firewall/Router/Encryption