What is Server Farm?
A server farm also connoted as server cluster/ranch/computer farm is a network of multiple computer servers that helps in streamlining the overall workload. It disseminates the workload to multiple servers in the same network, ensuring centralized access, easy data sharing and backup. Technically, in a server farm – computers, switches, routers, and other imperative IT components are mounted on a 19-inch rack in a data center facility.
What is the purpose of a server farm?
Server farms are massive computing structures comprising a collection of servers and other computing machines working in unison. An example of a server farm is a data centre or a crypto mining facility. The machines may not work together for a single goal and could be distributed to undertake different actions.
Where are server farms located?
Server farms are located off-site and primarily take the form of a data centre and sometimes a backup or recovery facility. An organization may also have a server farm located onsite in a separate temperature controlled facility.
Who uses server farms?
Typically crypto mining facilities and big organizations that have a colossal computing needs deploy and use server farms.
The largest server farm in the world is located in Hong Kong and has a whopping compute area of 7.7 million sqft.
Server farms are based on load-balancing software that helps in accomplishing varying needs of a business. Here, load balancer helps in determining the requirement of computing power from different machines. Apart from this, it prioritizes the different tasks depending on the end-user demands and load on the network. Even if one of the servers in the farm fails, another server in the farm takes the charge. Put simply, these servers also acts as a backup server in case of primary server failure. In addition to this, these servers can have individual OS installed or a shared OS can be quickly set up to proffer load balancing to cater to the multiple sever requests.
What are server farms called?
Server farms are often called server cluster or webs server farm. Server farms comprise of several computers in a single location grouped so as to dole out the overall workload.
Where are server farms located?
Server farms, usually, are co-located with routers or other network switches facilitating communication between several components of the cluster.
What does a server farm look like?
It looks exactly like any other data center. It is a collection of servers (computers) helped with a software application and supporting hardware to better distribute load among its components.
