General Features of Foresight Analytics Platform
Multilingual Support
Foresight Analytics Platform supports various language interfaces including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Arabic, and Azerbaijanian.
Unicode is supported for data provision.
Interaction with Web Services
Foresight Analytics Platform:
contains integrated application development environment, which enables the user to work with web services of third-party applications and implement new platform-based web services.
provides portal integration via remote web services. Support of WSRP, JSR 168 standards can be provided on the application layer by means of platform.
Supports high availability by means of integration with third-party software of the High Availability class, for example, SQL Server Failover Cluster, and so on.
Portal Integration
Foresight Analytics Platform supports portal integration via web services, portlets, and supports specification JSR 286. JSR 286 supports enhanced API comparing to JSR 168. This standard enables the user to implement the majority of scenarios without necessity of using non-typical extensions from portal providers. For example, JSR 286 supports common mechanism of interaction with portlets via events, while JSR 168 does not support this feature.
The portal integration using remote web services is also available. Support of the WSRP standard can be provided on the applicable layer via platform customization.
Synchronization and Data Exchange
Repository objects and their metadata can be copied and transferred between different repositories.
Any object of the repository can be copied and added to the repository as a copy. The copy becomes an independent repository object available for editing and usage.
On working with application systems using Foresight Analytics Platform to separate development processes as a rule several repositories are created - for development, for testing, for direct use. Settings and content of repository objects during development process can be changed. To synchronize objects, data and access permissions between repositories and for synchronizing version of application systems between developers and users, Foresight Analytics Platform uses update mechanism for repository objects that enables the user to transfer required information between repositories (objects, object access permissions, data).
Improved Performance and Fault Tolerance
Foresight Analytics Platform enables the user to use advantages of SMP systems and can use all available processor cores. User queries are executed by multiple flows within application server. Flows are automatically distributed to available processor cores by the operating system. This helps distribute computation load.
Fault tolerance of Foresight Analytics Platform is reached due to system location on multiple servers with common access point using workload balancer. In case of failure of one server in the system, the user's query is passed to another server for handling. Data on user work sessions is stored on dedicated nodes - state servers. State servers can be backed up and synchronized.
Scalability
Foresight Analytics Platform is a scalable platform because the performance of Foresight Analytics Platform increases as system resources increase.
To increase performance of Foresight Analytics Platform two approaches are available:
Vertical scaling. Performance is increased by adding resources (processor, memory, disk space) within one BI server.
Horizontal scaling. Performance is increased by adding another BI server or a web server to the system. Horizontal scaling is typical for distributed systems where systems are connected via the network or are combined into a cluster. Horizontal scaling enables the user to build cloud BI applications.
The scalable architecture of Foresight Analytics Platform, based on web services allows using the product for building cloud BI applications. Customers may use common database with the platform's access permissions of Foresight Analytics Platform, or a dedicated database for each client:
Load balancing is executed by means of Nginx or Microsoft Forefront TMG. To provide fail safety the BI server saves statuses of open objects to special nodes of status servers (based on Redis and Memcached).
Features of system building include the following:
The number of BI servers must exceed the number of web servers.
Each BI server may have state server deployed.
Scaling of database server is available, that is, using cluster DBMS.
Modularity
License policy of Foresight Analytics Platform provides customer a possibility to select only functional blocksthat are required at this stage of BI application implementation.
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