Regarding the components available in Infosphere 8.7(Server)

[kirankumarreddydesireddy]

Hi,

We are currently on Infoshere 8.7 server edition.

Just wanted to check, if can we install and use the other components i.e Business Glossary,Metadata workbench,Information Analyzer, once we have the licenses from IBM ? Or

Do we need to compulsory have parallel edition installed to make use of the above components(Business Glossary,Metadata workbench,Information Analyzer) ?

Thanks
Kiran

[vmcburney]

It can be a tricky solution architecture given the different requirements and use cases of the products. The products do not need to be installed together, there can be reasons for splitting them across servers.

Some general rules:
- DataStage can require more PVUs than any other product due to the high processing load, so the DataStage engine is often separate to all other products so they don't have to have matching PVU licenses. A large DataStage engine can use a much smaller Metadata Server for metadata services.
- Information Analyzer could previously be installed onto the Metadata Server or matched up to DataStage. It is increasingly being matched to DataStage in order to take advantage of emerging Data Quality Rules stage, if you want to build a data quality firewall you need to combine IA created rules with the DataStage Rules stage. This has a drawback of making your DataStage engine license a LOT more expensive - something IBM needs to fix. IA licensing needs to scale better.
- Putting Metadata Server, Business Glossary and Metadata Workbench alone on a server makes sense, making up what IBM bundles as a "Business Information Exchange". You would add Information Analyzer to this if you just wanted this server for discovering metadata, or better yet add or import InfoSphere Discovery content to it. In version 9.1 Business Glossary and Metadata Workbench are the only products in the suite that have easier configuration of security for Linux with extra installation steps for getting Active Directory or LDAP security working. You want single sign on for Business Glossary so everyone can use it, you don't necessarily want it for DataStage which needs to be a lot more secure as it has production data access.

[kirankumarreddydesireddy]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

In summary, I understood that, irrespective of the edition of Datastage(server jobs or parallel jobs), and based on the licensing of PVUs,we can use the components of datastage (Business Glossary,Metadata workbench,Information Analyzer) and my earlier assumption that, these components can be used in conjuction with parallel jobs Only is not correct.


Thanks
Kiran

[vmcburney]

Yes, sorry to answer the original question, you do not need a parallel DataStage engine to use Glossary or Metadata Workbench. The installation of Information Analyzer creates a parallel DataStage engine in order to run background jobs but you should only use it for IA jobs. While IA needs a parallel DataStage engine to run it does not require a separate DataStage parallel PVU license.