A typical Phoenix deployment has the following:
Application
Phoenix Client/JDBC driver
HBase client
A Phoenix client/JDBC driver is essentially a Java library that you should include in your Java code. Phoenix uses HBase as storage similar to how HBase uses HDFS as storage. However, the abstraction for Phoenix is not yet complete, for example, for implementing access controls, you need to set ACLs on the underlying HBase tables that contain the Phoenix data.