Datastage is normally used in large corporations as an interface between their different systems which also takes care of extraction, translation and the loading to the systems. The Datastage interfaces are called jobs which can be configured in such a way that they can run on single servers as well as multiple servers in a grid architecture. DataStage 7.X consisted of a two-tier infrastructure, with clients connected directly to the DSEngine. The DSEngine stored all of the metadata and runtime information, as well as controlled the execution of jobs… The Server is where the actual developed jobs reside and run. This can be housed on both UNIX as well as WINDOWS servers. Earlier versions of Datastage only supported UNIX servers. The server connection is done via Datastage client(s) which is a Windows based application with tools to prepare a Datastage job. On the Datastage server, work is organized into one or more “projects”.
As mentioned for, Datastage has two engines. The Parallel and the Server engine. In UNIX the server engine is located in a directory called DSEngine whose location is specified in a file called .dshome which will be present in the root directory. In Windows the server engine will be located in the folder <>:\IBM\InformationServer\Server and the parallel enginewill be located in <>:\IBM\InformationServer\PXEngine.
Development work in Datastage is organized into a number of work areas called “projects”. Each project has its own individual local Repository in which its own designs and technical and process metadata are stored. You will be able find the projects created in the dshome directory under the sibling folder ‘Projects’. This is the default directory. You will also be able to create projects in a directory of your liking. To find the directory of a particular project you will just have to log on to the Datastage administrator console.
In Version 8.0 the architecture is slightly different from previous versions. IBM InfoSphere Information Server 8 is installed in layers that are mapped to the physical hardware IBM had integrated Datastage to its Websphere server. The Information server console now has a set of services that can be accessed through the Information server console. This console stores metadata centrally so that the metadata can be accessed to all the products in the Information server suite, not only Datastage. It also has administrative services, login/security, connectivity services, etc centrally available for all products in the suite. These services are managed through an instance of a Websphere Application Server. The repository where all the metadata is stored is called XMETA and can be DB2/Oracle/SQL Server.