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Cisco IP Solution Center, 3.0: MPLS VPN Management User Guide, 3.0
OL-4344-01
Chapter1 About Cisco IP Solution Center
The Four-Tier System Architecture
•Control tier
The Control Tier consists of the ISC Repository (a relational database) and the task scheduling and
distribution system. In ISC, there is only one Control tier machine, and it is called the master
machine. The master machine is the nerve center of the whole infrastructure; you can consider it to
be identical to the ISC workstation itself. All vital information is stored in the Repository of the
master machine. The master controls how tasks are distributed to the back-end system. If very high
Repository throughput is required, a high-end database, such as the parallel Oracle, can be used to
gain the high performance and high throughput.
•Distribution tier
The Distribution tier consists of the Processing servers and Collection servers. Each Processing
server or Collection server runs on its own physical machine. Processing servers are responsible for
executing tasks such as provisioning, auditing, SLA data collection, and so on. There can be one or
more Processing server machines.
A Collection server is responsible for interacting with the network devices. For example,
configuration upload and download to a Cisco router is through its Collection server. In other words,
each Collection server owns a set of network devices. Collection servers and their geographically
related network devices are organized into collection zones. There can be one or more Collection
servers per installation. A Collection server is called into service when data is needed from one of
the devices that it owns.
Although the Web server, the Master server, the Processing server, and the Collection server are
normally installed on different physical machines for large installations, they can be collapsed into
a single machine for a small installation. In this case then, there is only one instance of the Web
server, Processing server, and Collection server.