Introduction

This document outlines the basic architecture employed in all modern networked systems. I usually find that these diagrams help people understand the complexity of integrating these components together to provide an overall system to the user.

A Simple Network System

A network system can be divided into 2 core areas, Server and Client, communicating via a Network infrastructure. The reason why this approach has become important to businesses is that by dividing it up in this manner you can allow sharing of work, information and resources.

Examples of this type of architecture are:

• Flat File Databases stored on a network drive and shared between users.
• Printer Queues on a File Server, allowing the sharing of printing resources.
• Webserver, serving HTML documents to a web Browser on a client.

If we take a closer look at the model, we find that it can be further sub-divided into 5 key layers which can equally apply to both clients and servers (see figure 2).

• Network Layer
• Physical Layer
• Operating System Layer
• Application Layer
• Proprietary Software Layer

The Application Layer has been divided into 2 layers, rather than left as one, to differentiate between "Off the Shelf" packages and "Proprietary" applications.

This is also done because "Proprietary" software is usually written to employ "Off the shelf" packages to provide a functional layer to the system. In architectural terms this is important when defining an organisation's standards.

Figure 2 A Network System Architectural Model

Advanced Network System

In the previous sections we have seen how a networked system is divided between client and server resources. In high transactional based environments there has been a trend to split the work up even further to a third intermediary, known in database environments as the Broker.

The role of the Broker is to off-load processing load, either from the client, server or both, as a means to boost performance. Common examples of this are:

• Splitting server operations between a database server and a web server to provide pages of information to a web browsing client.
• An application server front ending information requests from a mainframe and returning, the analysed information to the client.

Figure 3 Advanced Network Model