The ADX software supports a Unified or a Split configuration. If the ADX and its accompanying SQL Server database software is installed on one computer, it is known as a Unified ADX. If the SQL Server software is located on a different computer, it is known as a Split ADX.
The ADX split configuration provides the ADX software/user interface on one computer (the web/application server computer) and the alarm, audit, annotations, and historical trend data on another computer with Microsoft SQL Server software (the database server computer). See Figure 1.
Figure 2 shows at a high level the difference between the unified and split ADX configurations. Split ADX configurations are supported for 10-, 25-, 50-, or 100-user ADXs. For example, if you require your database server to be separate from your application servers, you may want to use an ADX split configuration.