Many Business Intelligence solutions are based on the use of a data warehouse. Here is a view of the components of a data warehouse both logically and physically. 
The data warehouse consists of several different elements:
- The source can come from legacy systems that are usually an operational system used by the corporation or external data sources,
- The data staging area is where data is processed (normalized and some history is stored) and moved to the presentation server.
- The presentation server takes the data, organizes it and stores is for future quires and reports
- The last step is the end user data access point, currently one of the most popular forms to access data is through a web page and mobile applications.
You can download the visio drawing I created here –>data-warehouse-elements.vsd
