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Oracle BI Communications Across Security Firewalls

In enterprise deployments, the Web Server typically resides in a De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) in a web tier separated from the public Internet and the corporate Intranet by firewalls. Oracle Business Intelligence supports this partitioning by providing a BI Presentation Services Plug-in component that can reside in the web tier allowing the deployment of BI Presentation Services within the intranet.

The BI Presentation Services Plug-in is of two types:

• For deployments using J2EE based application servers, it consists of a Java Servlet deployed in a web container on the J2EE server.
• For deployments using Internet Information Services (IIS) as the web server, the BI Presentation Services Plug-in is an ISAPI plug-in.

Figure 6 depicts the deployment of Oracle BI web components (BI Presentation Services and BI Presentation Services Plug-in) when the Web Server servicing Oracle BI resides in a DMZ. Two scenarios, one using IIS and the other with a J2EE based Application Server are shown.

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Figure 6. Deployment of Oracle BI Web Components and Communication Across Firewalls

The BI Presentation Services Plug-in, labeled in Figure 6 as BI Plug-in, directs web requests from Oracle BI clients to BI Presentation Services. The communication occurs using a proprietary protocol called sawtcp that is TCP/IP based. BI Presentation Services listens to remote procedure calls from one or more BI Presentation Services Plug-ins on the Listener port (default 9710).

The firewall separating the web tier from the corporate intranet must allow communication over the sawtcp TCP/IP protocol with the BI Presentation Services Listener port open.