Business intelligence and analytics software enable businesses to analyze performance data in order to make better decisions through the use of cloud computing—an Internet-based model for convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. This book is a practitioner’s guide for successful evaluation and design for implementation of Cognos Business Intelligence cloud solution, for either Cognos 8 BI or Cognos Business Intelligence Version 10. With pragmatic and practical information about the best practices and guidelines, as well as specific software and configuration steps, this guide for solutions and IT architects includes detailed screen shots, code samples, and input instructions. CA IBM Business Analytics and Cloud Computing Best Practices for Deploying Cognos Business Intelligence to the IBM Cloud By Anant Jhingran, Stephan Jou, William Lee, Thanh Pham, Biraj Saha MC Press Copyright © 2010 IBM Corporation All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-58347-363-4 Contents Title Page, Copyright Page, Acknowledgments, About the Authors, Introduction, 1 - Cloud Computing and Analytics, 2 - Getting Started, 3 - Installation and Configuration, 4 - Security Best Practices, 5 - Handling Cloud Topologies, 6 - Performance and Scalability Best Practices, 7 - High Availability Best Practices, CHAPTER 1 Cloud Computing and Analytics At the time of writing, a Google search on the phrase "cloud computing definition" returned more than 3.5 million results. There appear to be as many definitions of cloud computing as there are people excited about it! Some of these definitions are very good. For example, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a concise but comprehensive effort at http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing This book will not repeat such efforts at defining cloud computing. Instead, we intend this book to be a practical companion to leveraging cloud computing in your IBM Cognos analytics solution. As such, it focuses on the main characteristics of cloud computing with respect to their tangible advantages for you, the cloud practitioner. On-Demand Infrastructure On cloud computing platforms, the required IT infrastructure for your applications is provided to you, based on what you actually require. Nearly all clouds now provide compute cycles, networking, storage space, and memory capacity, all on an on-demand basis. Because you can simply release unused resources back into the pool, you do not have to worry about over-purchasing more hardware than you actually need. In a pure and simple comparison with traditional data centers, this arrangement provides immediate and obvious cost advantages. Underutilization of purchased hardware is a genuine problem. It's what made virtualization such an attractive IT strategy in the early 2000s: replace the physical hardware with virtual hardware so you can allocate virtual machines when you need them and deallocate them when you're done. This strategy is particularly cost-effective for analytical applications that are tied to seasonal behavior, such as a sales application that is used only during the end of a quarter. Small wonder that the major cloud platforms, including those from Amazon and IBM, are, at their lowest level, Web interfaces wrapped around virtual machines (VMs), storage, and networking. Being able to create and configure VMs through a simple browser interface or through Representational State Transfer (REST) calls is one simple way to think about and approach cloud computing. This pay-as-you-go, utility-based cost model is, in some ways, the most innovative aspect of cloud computing. You trade away the requirement for up-front capital expenditures (capex) to purchase hardware and software, and instead favor ongoing operational expenditures (opex) based on what you actually use. This book takes you through the process of leveraging such an infrastructure to create a fully working IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) virtual instance running in the cloud. This instance is then saved as an image, consuming no resources or cost, until you are ready and have a need for a Cognos deployment. While the steps in this book are based on the IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, they are also applicable with little modification to other cloud infrastructures, such as Amazon's. And of course, the best practices we describe here have general applicability and relevance, no matter how you ultimately deploy your Cognos application. On-Demand Higher Services Moving above the so-called Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer to the higher so-called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) layers is where cloud starts to differentiate itself from simple virtualization. The PaaS and SaaS cloud layers bring higher-level services to the table, and things get much more interesting. Rather than thinking in terms of machines, netw