tm1expert-not wrote:
My questions revolve around setting up a new TM1 setup. We have a Data Ware house in place ontop of a legacy ERP. When developing TM1, would it be easier to go against the ERP (which someday might be replaced) or against the Data Warehouse?
Doesn't really matter; you're looking at it the wrong way around.
First you determine what data you need in the TM1 system to meet your business needs.
Then you work out where you can get it from.
If the current answer to that question is the ERP, that's where you get it from. If that's subsequently replaced then there would need to be some form of transition to replace that data source with another one, but you'd face that issue with or without TM1 anyway. TM1 and its ETL tool TurboIntegrator are both very flexible, and changing from one data source to another isn't
technically very difficult once you have a handle on them; getting equivalent data fields from the new source can be more of a challenge, however. Always think about your content needs, then work backwards.
tm1expert-not wrote:
When installing TM1 on a multi-server setup, how would you split up the server setup? Is it similar to BI where you have a dispatcher and content store/ content manager? Which application should the more powerful server be allocated too?
I strongly suggest that you look at the TM1 Operations Guide which gives an overview of TM1 system architecture.
Each TM1 server session (the program that stores, calculates and serves up the data) can reside on only one physical server. (With the proviso that if you're running TM1 Web, for instance, the Web server can be on a different physical box, and with the other provisio about running multiple servers that I'll come back to below.) "The more powerful server" is a problematic expression, as it doesn't address... more powerful
how? The answer will depend on a range of questions such as how much of the data model will be calculated by rules vs how much is served up as straight, uncalculated, loaded data. If you have a heavily rule-dependent model then you'll want a fairly fast processor. However TM1 still doesn't make
huge use of parallel processing (paging Dr. Usherwood, Dr. Usherwood to this thread, please) so if you have a processor with a ginormous number of cores you're probably throwing money away as opposed to a processor which has fewer but faster cores.
RAM is undoubtedly the biggest limiting factor, though, since TM1 operates almost entirely in memory. I say "almost" because obviously it loads data from disk when it starts, and stores the data back to disk when it shuts down or you tell it to. If you have a very large model that can be a serious performance bottleneck if you have to do data saves during working hours, so fast disks aren't wasted. The more RAM you can throw at TM1, the happier it will be and the more scope you have for expanding its use... provided that you're running on 64 bit and are not constrained by low application memory limitations. (As an aside, be aware that under 64 bit your licence costs are likely to increase as you go for a server with more cores. No, I have no idea why. No, I can't see the justification for it either. But again, it's a reason why you need to be careful about which "more powerful" you're talking about.)
Another option in some models is to split the cubes up between different server sessions, in which case you
can have each session running on a different box and spread the load that way. The down side is that the sessions won't communicate with each other very well (they can, after a fashion, but there are limitations that I won't go into here) which means that the data stored on each server session should probably be fairly independent. Also users would need to log in to multiple sessions, though that's less of an issue if you go down the integrated login path.
Finally, and very importantly, you would need to be very certain that your licence agreement lets you do that. Not all of them do, and if yours doesn't it's not worth the aggravation if you are audited by IBM.