Systems Architecture

Systems Architecture - World of systems, servers & applications

To begin with, this is my first blog on any academic related topic!! (Earlier ones include football,films,food and fun :) ) 

Take away from :: Business Information Systems - Second Session (Praxis Business School)

Systems - Computer Systems (includes desktops,laptops mainly)

Architecture -  An allocated arrangement of physical elements which provides the design solution for a consumer product intended to satisfy the requirements of the functional architecture and the requirements baseline.

Data & Application are two things which are interchanged and mixed quite frequently. So, in our class we understood the basic difference between the two. Data is "what is to be processed" and application is "how it is to be processed". For example, the VLC player is the application which runs the ".vlc,.wmv etc" files which the data that is being provided.

Systems Architecture can be classified into 4 categories:

1. Single Tier

2. Two Tier

3. Three Tier

4. Multi Tier

Single Tier Architecture - This is the type of architecture where the data and the application reside in the same machine. This is done by organizations which are small and are not geographically spread.

Advantage:

1) High security as the data and application exist in a single system.

Disadvantage: 

1) Communication with other systems is not there

2-Tier Architecture - In a modern two-tier architecture, the server holds both the application and the data. The application resides on the server rather than the client, probably because the server will have more processing power and disk space than the PC.

Advantage :

1) Communication is faster

2) Removes data redundancy and helps different department to communicate via data

Disadvantage

1) 2-Tier architecture application performance will be degrade upon increasing the users beyond the 50-100 limit.

3-Tier Architecture : In a three-tier architecture, the data and applications are split onto separate systems, with the server-side distributed between a database server and an application server. The client is a front end, simply requesting and displaying data. Reason being that each server will be dedicated to processing either data or application requests, hence a more manageable system and less contention for resources will occur.

Advantage: 

1) High degree of flexibility in deployment platform and configuration

2) Improved Security – Client is not direct access to database

3) Enhanced scalability – Each tier can scale horizontally

Disadvantage : Increases complexity

Multi-tier architecture - N-tier application architecture provides a model by which developers can create flexible and reusable applications. By segregating an application into tiers, developers acquire the option of modifying or adding a specific layer, instead of reworking the entire application.

(4-Tier system include client tier,presentation tier, business service tier, data tier)

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