High availability refers to the uninterrupted availability of computer system resources. In an Informatica domain, high availability eliminates a single point of failure and provides minimal service interruption in the event of failure. When you configure high availability for a domain, the domain can continue running despite temporary network, hardware, or service failures.
The following high availability components make services highly available in an Informatica domain:
Resilience. An Informatica domain can tolerate temporary connection failures until either the resilience timeout expires or the failure is fixed.
Restart and failover. A process can restart on the same node or on a backup node after the process becomes unavailable.
Recovery. Operations can complete after a service is interrupted. After a service process restarts or fails over, it restores the service state and recovers operations.
When you plan a highly available Informatica environment, configure high availability for both the internal Informatica components and systems that are external to Informatica. Internal components include the domain, application services, application clients, and command line programs. External systems include the network, hardware, database management systems, FTP servers, message queues, and shared storage.
High availability features for the Informatica environment are available based on your license.
Example
As you open a mapping in the PowerCenter Designer workspace, the PowerCenter Repository Service becomes unavailable and the request fails. The domain contains multiple nodes for failover and the PowerCenter Designer is resilient to temporary failures.
The PowerCenter Designer tries to establish a connection to the PowerCenter Repository Service within the resilience timeout period. The PowerCenter Repository Service fails over to another node because it cannot restart on the same node.
The PowerCenter Repository Service restarts within the resilience timeout period, and the PowerCenter Designer reestablishes the connection.
After the PowerCenter Designer reestablishes the connection, the PowerCenter Repository Service recovers from the failed operation and fetches the mapping into the PowerCenter Designer workspace.