Administering an ISP Installation

Building the Second Tier

A site quickly becomes more complicated when ASP applications are run in conjunction with Windows 2000 components. Think of ASP applications as the glue that connects the presentation layer to the application and data services layers. ASP provides a rich and robust development environment. But to really increase the overall application performance, consider adding components.

Use an ASP application to invoke a component that is already compiled with your business logic, which resides on the application servers in the second tier. An application server can simply be a Windows 2000 Server that primarily supplies processor power for components.

At this point, the ASP applications that reside on the first-tier Web servers call on the application servers in the second tier to process the business logic. Part of that process could require that the component fetch data from the back-end database, located on the third tier.