(Kind Note: In this post i going to give a short hint about SAP system landscape don’t consider this as a SAP Architecture. Often times, SAP users, especially new comers misunderstands these two concepts.)
They system landscape basically is the set-up or arrangement of your SAP servers. Ideally, in an SAP environment, a three-system landscape exists. A three-system landscape consists of the Development Server-DEV, Quality Assurance Server-QAS and the Production Server-PROD. This kind of set-up is not primarily designed to serve as server clusters in case of system failure, the objective to enhance “configuration pipeline management”.
A Typical SAP Three-System Landscape would consist of one or two development system ==> one Quality system ==> Production system. (but it is not must to keep separate server for each systems, you can configure DEV & QAS on a same server but it is not advisable to keep PROD too in the same server)
Pipeline is the environment where the configuration in the development system is moved to the quality assurance system and finally to the production system. The whole idea is to sync the configuration of these systems at any point in time. Devlopment/configuration/changes are first made in the Development system, thoroughly tested in the Quality Assurance system then loaded into the production system. TMS Does this process nicely. Transport management system is the coordination of the movement of objects and configuration changes from the development system to the Quality Assurance system and then to the Production system.