The Power of Client/Server
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The Power of Client/Server |
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To understand how client/server technology works, consider this example:
A customer calls to change his address. Without client/server technology, the file server sends a copy of the company's entire customer file of 5,000 names and addresses down the wire to the order entry clerk's workstation. There the workstation sorts through the 5,000 names and addresses until it finds the appropriate customer record. After the clerk makes the necessary changes, the updated file travels back down the wire where it updates the file server.
If the company used a client/server system to accomplish the same task, the file server would sort through the 5,000 names and addresses, find the appropriate customer record and send a copy of that single record to the workstation. The order entry clerk would make the necessary changes and the updated record would then travel back up the wire to update the file server.
In the latter scenario, because the file server sorted the records, 4,999 names and addresses didn't have to make the two-way trip, saving precious bandwidth and time on the company's LAN. In this example, the actual time savings may seem insignificant—a second or two at best; however, if you consider a large environment, with 100 simultaneous users of the system, each processing thousands of transactions per hour, the benefits of client/server computing shine.
Client/server computing offers another significant benefit: distributed processing, which allows a single process—such as the aging of accounts receivable or the printing of monthly invoices—to be distributed across multiple computers throughout the organization. The client/server computer can monitor the available processing time on all computers and distribute tasks among them in order to squeeze the maximum amount of processing from the available resources. For example, Platinum for Windows uses a three-tier architecture that allows a company to set up multiple application servers throughout the organization. Together these multiple servers work seamlessly as one database, even though the data are actually distributed across multiple servers. The result is faster processing time. It's also easier for software applications to make SQL queries across a network.
