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The multi-tier architecture includes a back-end database, a middle tier of servers and clients. The back-end database has all the common data. The middle tier usually consists of a set of servers that performs processing. The client tier consists of thin clients, which can be HTML-only, Java applets, Java applications, or other suitable clients.
When you are looking to build a management application, where:
the management application has to be thin
multiple administrators using the management application should be able to talk to the server
all the processing of data should be done at the server side and passed on to the client
there is a need for more then one management application using a centralized server
you can opt for this middle-tier architecture.
Some of the benefits of the three-tier model are as follows.
Scalability: The key benefit is improved scalability as the servers can be deployed on many machines and the processing can be distributed. And the back-end requires connection only from servers and not from every client.
Re-usability: If the same kind of processing needs to be done by more than one client, the server can do the processing which can be used by all clients. This results in easy maintenance of code.
Data integrity: All updates are done through the middle tier and therefore the middle tier can validate the data that is updated in the database. The clients do not have direct access to the database thereby eliminating the risk of a client corrupting the data.
Reduced uploading time: Changes to business logic can be updated only on the servers resulting in easy maintenance and faster deployment.
In the middle-tier architecture, WebNMS SNMP API can be used for:
Data collection
Status polling
Network configuration
The client can use the distributed APIs of WebNMS, such as RMI and CORBA to access the middle tier. The back-end is the network from where the data is collected by the middle tier. Therefore the clients, the core APIs, and the network form a hybrid 3-tier model. Almost all the high-level APIs are supported from RMI and CORBA API.
For building scalable NMS, the WebNMS APIs can be used in the middle tier and XML can be used for communication between the client and the server.
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