Active and Standby Content Manager Components

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.

The standby Content Manager components are for failover protection. If the active Content Manager is not available because of a software or hardware failure, a standby Content Manager becomes active and requests are directed to it.

When the active Content Manager fails, unsaved session data is lost. When another Content Manager becomes active, users may be prompted to log on.

By default, the first Content Manager installed with IBM® Cognos® Analytics is the active one. An IBM Cognos Analytics server administrator can change the default Content Manager and the active Content Manager at any time. When IBM Cognos Analytics is started, the default Content Manager locks the content store from access by all other installations of Content Manager. These other Content Manager installations enter standby mode.

This failover mechanism works because dispatchers and the active Content Manager routinely communicate with each other. If a dispatcher can no longer reach Content Manager, the dispatcher signals a standby Content Manager, which becomes the active Content Manager. The other installations of Content Manager remain in standby mode for continuing failover support. The standby Content Managers retrieve cryptographic settings, such as the common symmetric key (used to encrypt and decrypt data), from the active Content Manager.

If you are installing multiple Content Managers, you must ensure that the system clocks on the Content Manager computers are synchronized for successful failover between Content Managers.