In this IBM® Redbooks® publication, we describe the role Cognos® plays in an Information On Demand (IOD) solution for IBM System z® and detail the functions of IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux® on System z in current deployment scenarios. We show typical deployment architectures that show how to access disparate data sources both on and off the System z platform and show how the functions of the Cognos family of products provides a way to consolidate different BI solutions on System z. We provide examples of Cognos functions for resolving business requirements using reporting and OLAP capabilities as well as general deployment considerations of IBM Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z. This publication is meant to help the Cognos Business Intelligence professional understand the strong points of System z architecture and the database specialist appreciate the Cognos family of products.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication addresses topics to leverage the virtualization strengths of the IBM Power platform to solve customer system resource utilization challenges and maximize system throughput and capacity. This IBM Redbooks publication will help you leverage the strengths of the POWER platform, provide implementation scenarios with Cognos® 8 Business Intelligence (BI) with the comprehensive set of the IBM PowerVMTM virtualization features, and identify and document best practices for exploiting the IBM PowerVM virtualization features within Cognos BI deployments to maximize utilization of system resources and maximize Cognos throughput and capacity. This book is targeted toward technical professionals (BI consultants, technical support staff, IT architects, and IT specialists) responsible for providing business intelligence solutions and support for Cognos BI on POWER® systems.

This IBM Redbooks® publication presents a Smart Analytics Cloud. The IBM Smart Analytics Cloud is an IBM offering to enable delivery of business intelligence and analytics at the customer location in a private cloud deployment. The offering leverages a combination of IBM hardware, software and services to offer customers a complete solution that is enabled at their site. In this publication, we provide the background and product information for decision-makers to proceed with a cloud solution. The content ranges from an introduction to cloud computing to details about our lab implementation. The core of the book discusses the business value, architecture, and functionality of a Smart Analytics Cloud. To provide deeper perspective, documentation is also provided about implementation of one specific Smart Analytics Cloud solution that we created in our lab environment. Additionally, we also describe the IBM Smart Analytics Cloud service offering that can help you create your own Smart Analytics cloud solution that is tailored to your business needs.

The IBM® Smart Analytics System 9600 is a single, end-to-end business analytics solution to accelerate data warehousing and business intelligence initiatives. It provides integrated hardware, software, and services that enable enterprise customers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy business-changing analytics across their organizations. As a workload-optimized system for business analytics, it leverages the strengths of the System z® platform to drive: Significant savings in hardware, software, operating, and people costs to deliver a complete range of data warehouse and BI capabilities Faster time to value with a reduction in the time and speed associated with deploying Business Intelligence Industry-leading scalability, reliability, availability, and security Simplified and faster access to the data on System z

Many companies have built data warehouses (DWs) and have embraced business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions. Even as companies have accumulated huge amounts of data, however, it remains difficult to provide trusted information at the right time and in the right place. The amount of data collected and available throughout the enterprise continues to grow even as the complexity and urgency of receiving meaningful information continues to increase. Producing meaningful and trusted information when it is needed can only be achieved by having a proper information architecture in place and a powerful underlying infrastructure. The amounts of data to mine, cleanse, and integrate are becoming so large that increasingly the infrastructure is becoming the bottleneck. This results in low refresh rates of the data in the data warehouse and in not having the information available in time where it is needed. And even before information can become available in a BI dashboard or a report, many preceding steps must take place: the collection of raw data; integration of data from multiple data stores, business units or geographies; transformation of data from one format to another; cubing data into data cubes; and finally, loading changes to data in the data warehouse. Combining the complexity of the information requirements, the growing amounts of data, and multiple layers of the information architecture requires an extremely powerful infrastructure. This IBM® RedguideTM publication explains how you can use IBM System z® as the foundation for your information management architecture. The System z value proposition for information management is fueled by the traditional strengths of the IBM mainframe, the specific strengths of DB2® for z/OS®, and the broad functionality of the IBM information management software portfolio. For decades, System z has proven its ability to manage vast amounts of mission-critical data for many companies throughout the world; your data is safe on System z. The available information management functionality on System z has grown from database management systems to a full stack of solutions including solutions for content management, master data management, information integration, data warehousing, and business intelligence and analytics. The availability of Linux® on System z provides an excellent opportunity to place certain components in an easy-to-manage and scalable virtualized Linux server, while benefitting from the System z hardware strengths. DB2 on z/OS can remain the operational data store and the underlying database for the data warehouse. The next generation of System z is growing into a heterogeneous architecture with which you can take advantage of System z-managed "accelerators" running on IBM System x® or IBM Power Blades. The first of these accelerators is the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer for DB2 for z/OS V1.1, an "all-in-one" solution in which System z, z/OS, DB2 on z/OS, an IBM BladeCenter®, and IBM storage work together to accelerate certain queries by one to two orders of magnitude. With the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer, slices of data are periodically offloaded from DB2 on z/OS to the BladeCenter. After a query is launched against that data, it will automatically run against the data kept on the BladeCenter. The BladeCenter will process the query an order of magnitude faster than DB2 on z/OS, because all data is cached in internal memory on the BladeCenter and special compression techniques are used to keep the data footprint small and efficient. As a solid information management architecture ready for the future, System z has it all.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication shows the power of IBM System z® virtualization and flexibility in sharing resources in a flexible production environment. In this book, we outline the planning and setup of Linux on System z to move from a development or test environment into production. As an example, we use one logical partition (LPAR) with shared CPUs with memory for a production environment and another LPAR that shares some CPUs, but also has a dedicated one for production. Running in IBM z/VM® mode allows for virtualization of servers and based on z/VM shares, can prioritize and control their resources. The size of the LPAR or z/VM resources depends on the workload and the applications that run that workload. We examine a typical web server environment, Java applications, and describe it by using a database management system, such as IBM DB2®. Network decisions are examined with regards to VSWITCH, shared Open Systems Adapter (OSA), IBM HiperSocketsTM and the HiperPAV, or FCP/SCSI attachment used with a storage area network (SAN) Volume Controller along with performance and throughput expectations. The intended audience for this IBM Redbooks publication is IT architects who are responsible for planning production environments and IT specialists who are responsible for implementation of production environments.