A key concept to understand when migrating to AWS is the physical distribution of cloud resources. AWS organizes its global infrastructure into Regions and Availability Zones (AZ). An AZ consists of one or more discrete data centers within a Region. When you deploy resources in AWS you must define the Region those resources are deployed to and one or more AZs. AWS best practices encourage deployments to be spread across multiple AZs (Multi-AZ) instead of isolating them to a single AZ. Why is this recommended? Read to find out more.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanSeptember 13, 2021Chris Chapman, AWS, Cognos to AWS, CognosComment

Deploying IBM Cognos with an AWS Application Load Balancer

An Application Load Balancer (ALB) may seem unnecessary when thinking about architecting Cognos on AWS. ALBs are most often used in serverless patterns or containerized applications. Those architectures obviously don’t apply to Cognos. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow design patterns from other architectures to benefit a Cognos deployment. Two reasons we recommend leveraging an ALB when deploying Cognos are simplified administration and improving your security posture.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanAugust 6, 2021Chris Chapman, AWS, Cognos to AWS, CognosComment

AWS Databases for IBM Cognos Analytics

Deploying Cognos on AWS immediately raises questions around the Cognos databases. What database type should we use? What service should we use to host them? Let’s dive in and hopefully, I can help you get a much clearer sense of what is best for your organization.

Deploying IBM Cognos on AWS

At PMsquare, we see more and more companies moving Cognos workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The reasons for this move vary from company to company. There may be a desire to reduce architecture and administration costs, improve the reliability of the Cognos infrastructure, dissatisfaction with IBM’s SaaS offering, or the move to the cloud is being mandated by a larger company initiative. Whatever the reason, if you need to migrate Cognos to a public cloud you will likely have many questions and this blog series will answer them!

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanMay 17, 2021Chris Chapman, AWS, Cognos, Cognos to AWSComment

Navigating AWS EC2 Launch Types

Transitioning your company from traditional, on-prem architecture to a cloud native architecture can be a technically consuming project. Along with the technical shift in the way you think about your architecture, you also have to reposition your thinking around pricing and provisioning. Leveraging infrastructure as a service (IaaS) means you no longer need to buy a physical box and wait for it to be installed. You are now able to provision a new instance (sever) as easily as renting a movie from Apple TV or signing up for a Spotify subscription.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)Chris ChapmanDecember 6, 2020Chris Chapman, AWSComment

T-Shirt Sizing Your Cognos 11 Environment

Planning a migration, upgrade or new implementation of Cognos Analytics? One common question is Cognos server sizing--in other words, how many servers will you need and how "large" should they be (CPU, RAM, etc.)? While this is a somewhat complex question, we provide you a chart with a high-level estimate to use in the early stages of your planning.

Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanApril 10, 2020Upgrade, Chris Chapman, CognosComment

Automatic Forecasting & Much More in Cognos 11.1.4

With the release of Cognos Analytics 11.1.4, we wanted to take a look at some of the more interesting features we thought were noteworthy in the release. There’s a lot in this release and we’d recommend browsing the official release notes here. So let’s get into it.

Cognos AnalyticsChris ChapmanNovember 8, 2019Overview, Forecasting, Chris Chapman, Cognos Comment