TM1 High Availability Architecture

[cadams]

Can anyone please point me to some documentation on how to setup and Configure TM1 in a high availability environment, I'm all too familiar with Cognos BI installations on a distributed environment, high dependency environment, but would like more info for setting up a TM1 infrastructure.

Thanks

[tomok]

What is your definition of a "high availability environment"? I can tell you that TM1 has no built-in features that address multi-server, auto-failover, blah, blah, blah...., type stuff so you'll have to home cook whatever you want. If you can be more specific as to exactly what features you want perhaps someone on here can share their experiences.

[cadams]

I was hoping for a fully fuctional failover like Cognos bi has.

Initially I want to play and have a multi server environment, seperate admin server, and seperate TM1 server??

Then I want to replicate that, ie have 2 admin severs, And 2 TM1 servers. Ideally switch off an admin server and have the other one take over, I under stand this can be done with shared log files. I just need to find some documentation on this stuff so I can understand it better.

I know large organisations such as HSBC have sever farms of TM1, I can't image for 1 second they don't have failover?..

[hbell]

We run 20+ instances on 5 physical boxes and do not use failover. Because of the "plug and play" nature of TM1 data directories it has never been difficult (in fact it is childishly easy) to swap out data directories into a different box in the case of problems - or if you simply wish to swap servers. All you need to be sure of is spreading your instances generously over a number of physical boxes so that there is always sufficient spare RAM (and a couple of spare "parked" TM1 services available) to spin-up another one or two instances on each box

We've run it that way for 14 years now (large US Financial Services company - 2,500 users) and never had a problem we couldn't handle. In that time we have probably had 2 or 3 hardware failures of which only one (with a dreaded BSOD which killed the logfile) was a serious headache.

I guess it depends what kind of operation you are supporting and the impact on it of (say) a 30 minute down-time once in a blue moon while you swap out an instance. We look after decision support for Finance (month-end management reporting, forecasts, budgets, client profitability analysis etc etc). We find users generally pretty tolerant and I find it hard to believe that the sort of apps people would typically run on TM1 would need the huge added cost of mirroring or something similar.

Not, I sense, the sort of answer you were looking for, but hope it helps ........hugh

[David Usherwood]

I know large organisations such as HSBC have server farms of TM1, I can't imagine for 1 second they don't have failover?..

Get imagining

[cadams]

We run 20+ instances on 5 physical boxes and do not use failover

I'm assuming that the 5 servers are physical server and not VM. I guess you have a common NAS in place for the data directory which itself has failover and all that goes with it.

I've read that you can only have 1 admin server, are these 5 servers acting as 1 server, or are they all independent services each tunning their own admin server ?

Thanks again
Noob

[qml]

I've read that you can only have 1 admin server

Not sure what you mean by that, but there is no such limitation. You can have up to 1 admin host server running on a given (virtual or physical) machine, but in any given environment you can have multiple admin hosts.

[Martin Ryan]

We have "warm" backup ability. Every night the Data directory is replicated off to our secondary data centre so at worst we'll lose a day's data.

During budget time we backup key cubes every hour after a save data all. This process is just a batch file run from a chore shortly after the save data is complete.

We did at one stage have two way replication between the primary and secondary data centres but when it got confused it ended up deleting the data directories on both sides. Fortunately we didn't trust IT and were taking our own backups of the data directory.

As mentioned above the simplicity of copying a data directory means that it's possible to have a pretty decent back up process in place with nothing but a save data all and a batch file or two. Given that TM1 doesn't have any inbuilt tools to facilitate hot back ups this is generally the best and easiest option.

Martin

[SueZhaZa]

Tell me about it... Currently i'm no longer in development.. I'm doing support for their TM1 application... Yes, the above mentioned bank..