E-Center for E-Business

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The ECEB Laboratory

The architecture for the ECEB Lab consists of a Web Server, two Application Servers, one Database Server and a Controller. The machines in the lab are primarily used for research and development of E-Commerce performance analysis and improvement applications.

The Web Server serves as a gateway to the Internet for the inside LAN. We use Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 as a Web server application. The Web Server also runs a firewall application to filter out potentially unfriendly incoming requests. It also generates requests that need to be processed by the Application Servers and submits them. Once the processing is done, the Web Server receives the processed data and generates an HTML page for submitting back to the client. HTML pages can also be static; they are locally stored on the server's drive waiting to be retrieved by the client.

The Application Servers perform resource-intensive business or application functions, such as user and credit card verifications, validation of received information submitted from the Web Server, and data forwarding to and from the Database Server. Additionally, segregating these functions provides for increased security.

The Controller is used to monitor incoming workload and monitor the overall system performance. The data being monitored is stored in the Database Server. The Controller is also used to dynamically configure internal system resources of other servers.