Client-Server

During your day to day operations, your business will repeatedly make requests for information/data from your Thunderbolt application (ERP, CRM, Project Management etc). In this case, you as the client are asking the system which is located on your server for resources. This is what is known as client server computing.

Your server will serve multiple clients (i.e. your staff) at the same time while each staff is in contact with only the one server. Both your staff and your server will communicate via a web server.

Some points to note are:

- Your client server computing works with a system of request and response. Your staff sends a request to your server and your server responds with the correct data.

- Your client and server application (such as Tentacle’s Thunderbolt platform) will follow a common communication protocol so they can easily interact with each other.

- Your server will only accommodate a limited number of client requests at a time. It is important to communicate any additional bulk staff members to your IT team so they can accommodate for the extra bandwidth that will be required.

- A DoS (Denial of Service) attack will completely stop your server’s ability to respond to your staff requests. The DoS attack does this by inundating your server with multiple false requests.

- As oppose to “peer to peer” systems where a collection of codes works collectively to communicate with each other, in client server computing, there is just one central node that services many client nodes.