A typical server farm.

A server farm is a collection of computer servers usually maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability of one machine. Often, server farms will have both a primary and a backup server allocated to a single task, so that in the event of the failure of the primary server, a backup server will take over the primary server's function. Wikimedia servers, by jimbo wales, dual-license gfdl, cc attribution-sharealike Originally uploaded to meta by Kate Turner Copied from http://meta. ... Wikimedia servers, by jimbo wales, dual-license gfdl, cc attribution-sharealike Originally uploaded to meta by Kate Turner Copied from http://meta. ... In computing, a server is a software application that carries out some task (i. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

Server farms are typically co-located with the network switches and/or routers which enable communication between the different parts of the cluster and the users of the cluster. A modular network switch with 3 network modules (a total of 24 Ethernet and 14 Fast Ethernet ports) and one power supply. ... This article describes the computer networking device. ...

Server farms are commonly used for cluster computing. Many modern supercomputers consist of giant server farms of high-speed processors connected by either Gigabit Ethernet or custom interconnects such as Myrinet. Linux Cluster at Purdue University A computer cluster is a group of locally connected computers that work together as a unit. ... A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. ... A CPU The processor sub-system of a data processing system processes received information after it has been encoded into data by the input sub-system. ... Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) is a term describing various technologies for implementing Ethernet networking at a nominal speed of one gigabit per second. ... Myrinet, ANSI/VITA 26-1998, is a high-speed local area networking system designed by Myricom to be used as an interconnect between multiple machines to form computer clusters. ...

Another common use of server farms is for web hosting. Web hosting is a service that provides individuals, organizations and users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the Web. ...

Server farms are increasingly being used instead of or in addition to mainframe computers by large enterprises, although server farms do not as yet reach the same reliability levels as mainframes. Because of the sheer number of computers in large server farms, the failure of individual machines is a commonplace event, and the management of large server farms needs to take this into account, by providing support for redundancy, automatic failover, and rapid reconfiguration of the server cluster. A 1990 Honeywell-Bull DPS 7 mainframe CPU Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are large and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for mission critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and financial transaction processing. ... Failover is the capability to switch over automatically to a redundant or standby computer server, system, or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active server, system, or network. ...

The performance of the very largest server farms (thousands of processors and up) is typically limited by the performance of the data center's cooling systems rather than by the performance of the processors. For this reason, the critical design parameter for such systems tends to be performance per watt of generated heat, rather than performance per processor. A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and communications equipment. ...

See also

• Link farm & Wiki farm
• Blade server
• Data center
• Render farm