PowerCenter has a service-oriented architecture that provides the ability to scale services and share resources
across multiple machines. The Informatica domain supports the administration of the PowerCenter and Informatica
services. A domain is the primary unit for management and administration of services in PowerCenter.
A domain contains the following components:
¨ One or more nodes. A node is the logical representation of a machine in a domain. A domain may contain
more than one node. The node that hosts the domain is the master gateway for the domain. You can add other
machines as nodes in the domain and configure the nodes to run application services such as the Integration
Service or Repository Service. All service requests from other nodes in the domain go through the master
gateway.
A nodes runs service processes, which is the runtime representation of an application service running on a
node.
¨ Service Manager. The Service Manager is built into the domain to support the domain and the application
services. The Service Manager runs on each node in the domain. The Service Manager starts and runs the
application services on a machine.
¨ Application services. A group of services that represent Informatica server-based functionality. The
application services that run on each node in the domain depend on the way you configure the node and the
application service.
Informatica Domain 3
You use the Informatica Administrator to manage the domain.
A domain can be a mixed-version domain or a single-version domain. In a mixed-version domain, you can run
multiple versions of services. In a single-version domain, you can run one version of services.
If you have the high availability option, you can scale services and eliminate single points of failure for services.
The Service Manager and application services can continue running despite temporary network or hardware
failures. High availability includes resilience, failover, and recovery for services and tasks in a domain.
This domain has a master gateway on Node 1. Node 2 runs a PowerCenter Integration Service, and Node 3 runs the PowerCenter Repository Service.