Deployment questions for CRN

[Borv]

Guys, I apologize for bringing these questions out here. It is not like I am asking you to do my job or anything, CRN is really not my area of expertise; any constructive input is greatly appreciated.

Background: Our customers have three tiers

• Web tier (Windows 2003/WebLogic 8.1)
• Analytics tier (AIX 5.2) and
• Data tier (Oracle 10.2.0).

Our partners provide our customers with a marketing analytics product, which is deployed in all three tiers:

• Web tier hosts some J2EE apps,
• Analytics tier hosts a data crunching unix server and
• data tier hosts some tables specific to that data crunching server.

Customer has a production data in data tier as well (several GBs worth of sales/marketing stuff). Everything is separated by firewalls. Everything was just fine unless partners came up with new software version...

New version of partner's applications comes integrated with CRN. I.e. there is a J2EE piece that uses CRN to do some reporting against their server's specific tables and customer's production data. Now we are really in situation where we have to plug in Cognos somewhere, here are the questions I have so far:

• Where do I install CRN? Web tier with windows can host web applications (we can drop some Apache or IIS there), while analytics box is way more powerful. We know that users will not use CRN directly. Please consider that poking holes in firewall requires one's firstborn, left arm and 2 pints of blood per each open port.


• Production database uses WE8ISO8859P1 encoding for chars, nchars are UTF16. CRN's content manager wants UTF8 for entire database. Vendor requires content manager db, their tables and production database on the same database server. Does this mean we must convert entire production DB to UTF8? DB contains only ANSI characters.


• We attempted deploying CRN on AIX (analytics box). We can run bin/crconfig.sh tool only once. If we start it for the second time it fails with "Can't get line text" error and suggests reinstalling the Cognos. This is real pain in the neck right now... Any ideas?


• I found an embedded Tomcat within CRN install. Does CRN use it for internal stuff or can I use it as gateway web server as well?

Thanks in advance...

[COGNOiSe administrator]

I can kick AIX behind, anyday with a Windows install ...  ;D

Anyhow, CRN content store has to be UTF8 (or 16). NO exceptions, so you've got to find one, or switch to 8.2 which offers Apache Derby for content store.

You can install CRN ANYWHERE, Windows or AIX, just a matter of how many arms are you left with ... But if you already have a compatible J2EE server (WebLogic) you have a choice of deploying it with the included Tomcat (cause CRN only requires a container and is not a J2EE app), or package it nicely and deploy it on WebLogic (still having nightmares), but it is going to be an overkill.

Read docs carefully, cause there are alot of minute details, which can brake your installation in such a complex environment. Or bring in a consultant who has done it before (wink, wink, ...)  ;)

[Borv]

Thanks for your input :-)