More than one Content Manager

You can install any number of installations of Content Manager, although only one is active at any time. The other installations each act as a standby Content Manager. One becomes active only if a failure occurs that affects the active Content Manager computer. For failover support, it is advisable to install Content Manager on two or more computers.

Install multiple Content Managers

Content Manager stores data that IBM® Cognos® Analytics needs to operate, such as report specifications, published models, and the packages that use them; connection information for data sources; information about the external namespace and the Cognos namespace itself; and information about scheduling and bursting reports. The content store is a relational database management system (RDBMS). There is only one content store for each IBM Cognos installation.

You may choose to install Content Manager separately from the Application Tier Components. For example, you may want Content Manager in your data tier instead of in the applications tier.

When an active Content Manager fails, unsaved session data is lost. When the new active Content Manager takes over, users may be prompted to logon.

In the following diagram, the gateway passes the request to the dispatcher (not shown), which passes it to the default active Content Manager computer. Because the computer has failed, the request is redirected to the standby Content Manager computer, which became active when the default active Content Manager computer failed.

Figure 1. Installation with an active and a standby Content Manager

Configuration requirements

On each computer where you install Content Manager, you must

specify connection information to the content store
specify the Dispatcher URIs
specify all Content Manager URIs
specify the Dispatcher URI for external applications
set up a connection to an email server (if you want to email reports or send notifications)