Replication ??

[mukeshrajdass]

There are alot of discussion about "poor" TM1 performance especially over a WAN for Excel users... A lot of options are considered but IRRITATINGLY no mention is made about REPLICATION to a remote server as an option..WHY ???

Thanks

[declanr]

Replicating your model to distributed servers is of course a great option and very often used for global organisations.

As long as users inputting on server A have no requirement to see what the users on server B are inputting (i.e. no dependent data feeds) then it's a great option; you just need to work out when the best time to sync up all the servers is... or whether most servers even need to know what the others have done - perhaps locations are completely independent and you just need 1 central server at HO to do the ultimate consolidations.

One thing to note is that replication has certain issues that may make it more reliable to instead create TI processes of your own to export and import data between the servers, using CSVs or a SQL DB etc as a medium.

Of course licencing multiple servers for TM1 can get rather pricey which is why the finance heads may want to do some cost benefit calculations before going ahead with such an idea.

[tomok]

Of course licencing multiple servers for TM1 can get rather pricey which is why the finance heads may want to do some cost benefit calculations before going ahead with such an idea.

Replication is a no-go because of this very reason. IBM has raised the server price of TM1 so high now that you would have to be crazy to replicate anything. It is much more cost effective to implement Citrix when you factor in hardware costs, software costs and of course the time that would be needed to set up and manage the replication process.

[mattgoff]

There are alot of discussion about "poor" TM1 performance especially over a WAN for Excel users... A lot of options are considered but IRRITATINGLY no mention is made about REPLICATION to a remote server as an option..WHY ???

Thanks

"IRRITATINGLY" is an interesting emphasis.

I've been using replication for over seven years now across versions 9.0 to 9.5. In my experience, it's extremely fragile and has to be monitored very closely as planets can become desynchronized with the star "silently." Once this happens, the only way to recover is to manually identify each mismatch, determine which value is authoritative, and copy to each server. If you're willing to accept whatever is on the star as authoritative, recovery can be done by re-establishing the replication connection (side effect: all global views and subsets on the planet are lost), manually copy missing data to the planet, or (as I do) zero and rewrite (via TI) the whole cube (or portion) on the star so the full dataset is resynchronized on the next repsync.

If I was designing a TM1 system from scratch, I would never in a million years choose replication again. Between the cost of the additional servers, the administration overhead even when things are running well (e.g. upgrades are a full day nightmare), and the inevitable sync "glitches" Citrix or Remote Desktop are the way to go.

Matt

[mukeshrajdass]

Appreciate the feedback from all of you....It has changed my perspective and preference...