Anticlue

Crystal Enterprise Tiers

Crystal Enterprise, CE, is a tier based system. The components are logically grouped based on what they do.

The five tiers are:

1. The Client Tier refers to the Crystal Management Console which is a web based delivery system. There are also custom apps that can be created.


2. The Application Tier is where the server side components are processing, in the default CE install on Windows this is the Web Component Server and Web Connector to the Web Server, IIS.


3. The Intelligence Tier is the management of the CE system, maintaining the security, server process communication, auditing, and storing report instances. It contains the Crystal Management Server, Cache Server, File Repository Servers, and Event Server.


4. The Processing Tier is the report generator part of the system. It works with the databases. Here one finds the Report Job Server, Page Server, Report Application Server, and Program Job Server.


5. The Data Tier is the databases that will be utilized on the CE system.

Here is the extensible part of CE, components can be installed on one machine, or spread across many machines. A tier is sorta like a layer of the system. In CE, services are referred to as servers, but many of these server processes are involved in comprising the system. So a service can be installed on one machine or a couple. They can also be redundant for instance you can run two Crystal Management Server processes to ensure there is no downtime.