IBM Information Server Architecture

IBM Information Server is a client-server architecture made up of client-based

design, administration, and operation tools that access a set of server-based

data integration capabilities through a common services layer

In this section, we briefly discuss the following topics:

Component overview

Component overview

Client tier

IBM Information Server provides a number of client interfaces, optimized to

different user roles within an organization. The clients tier includes IBM

InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage clients (Administrator, Designer, and

Director), IBM Information Server console, and IBM Information Server Web

console.

There are two broad categories of clients — Administrative clients and User

clients. Both these types of clients have desktop and Web based interfaces

Administrative clients

These clients allow you to manage the areas of security, licensing, logging,

and scheduling.

– Administration tasks are performed in the IBM Information Server Web

console. The IBM Information Server Web console is a browser-based

interface for administrative activities such as managing security and

creating views of scheduled tasks.

– For IBM InfoSphere DataStage and IBM InfoSphere QualityStage project

administration, you use the IBM InfoSphere DataStage Administrator

client. It administers IBM InfoSphere DataStage projects and conducts

housekeeping on the server. It is used to specify general server defaults,

add and delete projects, and to set project properties. User and group

privileges are also set using the Administrator client.

These clients help perform client tasks such as creating, managing, and

designing jobs, as well as validating, running, scheduling. and monitoring

jobs. The IBM Information Server console is a rich client-based interface for

activities such as profiling data and developing service-oriented applications.

– The IBM InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage Designer helps you

create, manage, and design jobs. You can also use the Designer client to

define tables and access metadata services.

The Designer client allows you to move DataStage and QualityStage

objects between projects on the same Information Server engine, or on

different Information Server engines. You can also use the Information

Server Manager client to move objects from one domain to another.

The Information Server Manager supports the model of having separate

systems for the developing, testing and running of DataStage and

QualityStage jobs. It facilitates the model by providing secure and

managed methods of moving objects between the different systems.

– The IBM InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage Director client is the

client component that validates, runs, schedules, and monitors jobs on the

IBM InfoSphere DataStage Server.

User clients

Server tiers

The server tiers of the Information Server Platform that includes the Services,

Engine, Repository, Working Areas, and Information Services Director Resource

Providers as follows:

Note:

Server 2003.

Server tiers

The server tiers of the Information Server Platform that includes the Services,

Engine, Repository, Working Areas, and Information Services Director Resource

Providers as follows:

Services tier

IBM Information Server is built entirely on a set of shared services that

centralize core tasks across the platform. Shared services allow these tasks

to be managed and controlled in one place, regardless of which suite

component is being used.

The Services Tier includes both common and product-specific services:

– Common services are used across the Information Server suite for tasks

such as security, user administration, logging, reporting, metadata, and

execution.

– Product-specific services provide tasks for specific products within the

Information Server suite. For example, IBM InfoSphere Information

Analyzer calls a column analyzer service (a product-specific service) that

was created for enterprise data analysis. The shared service environment

allows integration across IBM Information Server because they are

deployed using common SOA standards.

IBM Information Server products can access three general categories of

service:

– Design

Design services help developers create function-specific services that can

also be shared.

– Execution

Execution services include logging, scheduling, monitoring, reporting,

security, and Web framework.

– Metadata

Using metadata services, metadata is shared “live” across tools so that

changes made in one IBM Information Server component are instantly

visible across all of the suite components. Metadata services are tightly

integrated with the common repository. You can also exchange metadata

with external tools by using metadata services.

The common services layer is deployed on the J2EE™-compliant application

server IBM WebSphere® Application Server, which is included with IBM

Information Server.

Note:

helps you build, run, integrate, and manage dynamic Web based

applications typically involving HTTP protocol.

Repository tier

The shared repository is used to store all IBM Information Server product

module objects

with other applications in the suite. Clients can access metadata and results

of data analysis from the respective service layers.

1 (including IBM InfoSphere DataStage objects), and is shared

This is the parallel runtime engine that executes the IBM Information Server

tasks. It comprises the Information Server engine, Service Agents, and

Connectors and Packaged Application Connectivity Kits (PACKS

– The IBM Information Server engine consists of the products that you

install, such as IBM InfoSphere DataStage and IBM InfoSphere

QualityStage. It runs jobs to extract, transform, load, and standardize data.

The engine runs DataStage and QualityStage jobs. It also executes the

parallel jobs for Information Analyzer tasks.

– Service Agents are Java™ processes that run in the background on each

computer that hosts IBM InfoSphere DataStage.They provide the

communication between the Services and Engine tiers of Information

Server.

– Connectors and PACKS

IBM Information Server connects to a variety of information sources

whether they are structured, unstructured, on the mainframe, or

applications. Metadata-driven connectivity is shared across the suite

components, and connection objects are reusable across functions.

Connectors provide design-time importing of metadata, data browsing and

sampling, run-time dynamic metadata access, error handling, and high

functionality and high performance run-time data access.

Prebuilt interfaces for packaged applications called PACKS provide

adapters to SAP®, Siebel®, Oracle, and others, enabling integration with

enterprise applications and associated reporting and analytical systems.Engine tier2).

Working areas

These are temporary storage areas used by the suite components.

Information service providers are the (data) sources of operations for your

services. Using IBM InfoSphere Information Services Director, you can create

services from five sources — IBM InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage,

IBM DB2 for LUW, IBM InfoSphere Federation Server, IBM InfoSphere

Classic Federation Server for z/OS, and Oracle Database Server.

Information Services Director (ISD) Resource Providers

1.2.2 Topologies supported

IBM Information Server is built on a highly scalable parallel software architecture

that delivers high levels of throughput and performance. For maximum

scalability, integration software must do more than run on Symmetric

Multiprocessing (SMP) and Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) computer

systems. If the data integration platform does not saturate all of the nodes of the

MPP box or system in the cluster or Grid, scalability cannot be maximized. The

IBM Information Server components fully exploit SMP, clustered, Grid, and MPP

environments to optimize the use of all available hardware resources.

Note:

operating systems:

The Information Server Platform 8.0.1 release supports the following

IBM AIX 5.2, 5.3

HP-UX Itanium™ 11i v2

HP-UX PA-RISC 11i v2

Sun™ Solaris™ 9, 10

Red Hat Enterprise Server Linux 4 (Intel®, AMD™)

System z™)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Linux 10 (Intel, AMD, System p™,Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 (32-bit)

IBM Information Server supports multiple topologies to satisfy a variety of your

data integration and hardware business requirements, as follows:

Two-tier

Three-tier

Cluster

For all topologies, you can add clients and engines (for scalability) on additional

computers.

To be continued in Next post....GridAn Application Server is a high performance transaction engine thatClients are supported on 32-bit Microsoft® Windows XP Pro, Vista, andTopologies supported