New Generation (continued)
High Availability and Business Intelligence - Working Together!
Executive Summary
Using a High Availability (HA) mirror machine as a server for Business Intelligence (BI) dramatically improves the perceived and measured usefulness of HA hardware and software. It extends the second machine from acting as merely an insurance policy into an integral part of the business operation. Selling BI in conjunction with HA presents a second business case that dramatically improves ROI and extends the perceived utility of IT resources.
Improving ROI for HA using BI
The HA server is a vital component of any significant business IT operation. Its benefits are obvious when the need for it arises. Frequently, however, the investment in HA technology is viewed as a costly insurance plan that will rarely be needed. When the need is not immediate
or cannot be pressed into the minds of executives, adding BI to the offering can elevate the ROI and increase support for the HA project. The HA server can be used to distribute information to data consumers without impacting transaction system performance.
In many companies, the real and imagined impact on server performance is a major technical impediment to their advancement from query and reporting to parameterized reporting or data warehousing. Oftentimes, companies will have to install an additional hardware server simply to handle the BI workload. This box serves no other function and reduces the ROI of the BI project.
By using the HA server as the BI server, customers can minimize their hardware investment to accomplish two important and valuable tasks. They will have a server with up to date information standing by for times of need and all of the time for BI applications. The ROI for both can be combined on one project for one server in one sale.
Extend IT Resources Into Organization
Using the HA server as the BI server creates a user community that would otherwise be unaware of the depth of IT activities. The data consumers will come to regard the HA system as integral to their daily operations and decision-making.
The higher notoriety achieved is an intangible benefit for the IT organization. By involving line of business managers and executives, IT management can build goodwill with others departments within the enterprise. There is no downside for the line of business managers and executives. They will get better services both through the HA server when needed and through the greater access to information that can come from the BI software running on the HA server.
Either project on its own justifies the use of IT resources and expands the functionality of the computers in the server room. Combining both projects, resources beyond IT can and should be used. Rather than a technical sale, selling BI with HA becomes a combined technical and business operations effort.
NGS-IQ An Ideal Architecture for Deployment on HA Servers
When considering the implementation of a BI solution on an HA server, it is important that you ensure that the BI solution can perform without modifying the mirrored database. The NGS-IQ BI solution, with its read-only design and Windows-based OLAP capabilities, fits this requirement
perfectly. Users cannot change the HA database and multi-dimensional views of this data are achieved at the Windows workstation, without the creation of a proprietary OLAP database on the iSeries.