Architecture overview and diagram

Crystal Enterprise is a multi-tier system. Although the components are responsible for different tasks, they can be logically grouped based on the type of work they perform. If you are new to Crystal Enterprise, use this section to gain familiarity with the Crystal Enterprise framework, its components, and the general tasks that each component performs.

In Crystal Enterprise, there are four tiers: the client tier, the intelligence tier, the processing tier, and the data tier. To provide flexibility, the components that make up each of these tiers can be installed on one machine, or spread across many.

The following diagram illustrates how each of the components fits within the multi-tier system. Other Crystal products, such as Crystal Analysis and Smart Reporting Technology, plug in to the Crystal Enterprise framework in various ways. This section describes the framework itself. Consult each product's installation or administration guides for details about how it integrates with the Crystal Enterprise framework.

The "servers" are services that run on Windows machines and daemons that run on UNIX machines. These services can be "vertically scaled" to take full advantage of the hardware that they are running on, and they can be "horizontally scaled" to take advantage of multiple computers over a network environment. This means that the services can all run on the same machine, or they can run on separate machines. The same service can also run in multiple instances on a single machine.

For example, you can run the Web Connector and the Web Component Server on one machine, while you run the Job Server on a separate machine. This is called "horizontal scaling." If the Job Server is running on a multi-processor computer, then you may choose to run multiple Job Servers on it. This is called "vertical scaling." The important thing to understand is that, even though these are called servers, they are actually services and daemons that do not need to run on separate computers.

The remainder of this section describes each tier, the key Crystal Enterprise components, and their primary responsibilities.

Click the appropriate link to jump to that section:

• Client tier
• Intelligence tier
• Processing tier
• Data tier

Tip:    When you are familiar with the architecture and want to customize your system configuration, see Managing and Configuring Servers and Scaling Your System.