Understanding the Middle-Tier Environment

The middle tier of the SAS Intelligence Platform enables users to access intelligence data and functionality with a Web browser. This tier provides Web-based interfaces for report creation and information distribution, while passing analysis and processing requests to the SAS servers.
The middle tier of the SAS Intelligence Platform provides an environment for running applications such as SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Information Delivery Portal. These applications run in a Web application server and have a graphical user interface that users navigate with a Web browser. These applications rely on servers on the SAS server tier to perform SAS processing, including data query and analysis.
The following figure shows how the middle tier interacts with the other tiers of the SAS Intelligence Platform. For a description of these components, see SAS Intelligence Platform: Overview.
Architecture of the SAS Intelligence Platform
SAS Intelligence Platform architecture
The middle tier includes the following software elements:
  • a Web application server
  • a Java Development Kit
  • SAS Web applications, which can include SAS Web Report Studio, the SAS Information Delivery Portal, the SAS BI Dashboard, and other SAS products and solutions
  • the SAS Web Infrastructure Platform, which includes the SAS Content Server and other infrastructure applications and services
  • a Java remote method invocation (RMI) server, which provides access to SAS Foundation Services and associated extension services
The SAS Intelligence Platform architecture provides the flexibility to distribute these components according to your organization's requirements. For small implementations, the middle-tier software, SAS Metadata Server, and other SAS servers, such as the SAS Workspace Server and SAS Stored Process Server, can all run on the same machine. In contrast, a large enterprise might have multiple servers and a metadata repository that are distributed across multiple platforms. The middle tier in such an enterprise might distribute the Web applications to many Web application server instances on multiple machines.
The following figure illustrates the middle-tier components:
Middle-Tier Components
Middle-Tier Components
Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.