How do I resolve this data source connection issue with Cognos?

Question

We have (fairly recently) installed IBM's Cognos 10 as our business intelligence reporting tool. Most of the databases that we report over are DB2 9.7 LUW Enterprise Edition. We installed the DB2 Runtime-Time Client in order for Cognos to have access to the driver to communicate with DB2.

We also have some legacy systems and databases on our iSeries (aka AS/400) - so this means DB2 for i. We need Cognos to now recognize these databases. From what we have read up on, we need to install DB2Connect to grant access to DB2 for i from a DB2 LUW perspective.

Our Cognos was installed on a Windows Server system. We installed the RTC on the same system and can catalog DB2 LUW databases. We can get Cognos to create data sources with those databases.

To get iSeries functionality, we recently installed DB2Connect (on the same system as Cognos and RTC) and were able to catalog the iSeries database and connect and call into it. But we cannot get Cognos to see the cataloged database. It just looks like it is not there.

Some of the documentation we looked at makes it seem like you cannot access two different DB2 drivers locally within the same process in Cognos.

Our thoughts:

1. Uninstall RTC and just install DB2Connect with all the datasources cataloged through that and then have Cognos look them up. Our concern with this method is that we are afraid that Cognos may lose information for existing reports and projects that are already set up. We do not want to mess up/lose work already done by other teams.
2. We are wondering if there would be a nice clean way to migrate from RTC to DB2Connect so we could move connections off of the one to the other. Our concern here...how do we get DB2Connect to be recognized by Cognos in the first place?
3. Is there another way to catalog the iSeries databases and/or get them recognized by Cognos?

Thoughts? Ideas?

Edit: Our company has decided not to wait. They are bringing in a consultant to help us rebuild this from scratch so we better understand the product, how it installs, works, etc.

That being said, I would still welcome any thoughts or ideas on this one.

Answer 1

What we ended up doing was rebuilding our environment since it was only "development" anyway. We installed DB2 Connect rather than the Runtime-Client so that way we could catalog the iSeries databases and the LUW databases for Cognos to use.

We also could have used a gateway pattern where we could have set up DB2 Connect as a "Gateway Server" and cataloged the iSeries databases there and then cataloged the databases from the Gateway Server on the Runtime Client. That would have gotten us around our original issue too.

Interestingly enough, we were steered away from using a Gateway Server when we rebuilt our environment. No reason why. Even though IBM supports it, they don't recommend it. Only thing I can think of is that it introduces another failure point.