What is an Enterprise Deployment?
The enterprise deployment is an expansion of the base deployment, but has increased security, manageability, availability, and scalability. You can include additional servers to reduce the single points of failure in the system and to improve performance. The enterprise deployment includes an additional firewall between the Web and data tiers, separate domain controllers for each tier, and a separate internal design-time environment.
The enterprise deployment isolates specific functionality onto separate servers, instead of running multiple services on the same server. This isolation enables the Web servers to use their resources for presenting site content, and enables the database servers to use their resources for processing data.
The following figure shows the network diagram for the enterprise deployment.
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The internal design-time environment contains the staging server and the internal development/test/business management tier. You can use the staging server as a pre-production environment for data before transferring the data to the run-time environment. You can use the internal development/test/business management tier as a development tier to create applications before moving the data to the staging tier.
Business users can connect directly to the data tier by using the respective Business Management applications, such as the Catalog Manager and Marketing Manager. You can use the Catalog Manager and the Marketing Manager in the staging tier or the internal development/test/business management tier only.
Avoid making catalog schema changes to a production run-time site, because this requires the affected catalog to be rebuilt.