Web Farm

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What Does Web Farm Mean?

A web farm is a collection of servers housed in a single location called a data center in order to function as a coordinated group that can be controlled and managed easily.

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The farm is used to accomplish needs that a single machine cannot provide such as serving a large number of people on a website or a specific application or providing more resources in a cloud environment.

A web farm is also known as a server farm or a server cluster.

Techopedia Explains Web Farm

Server farms are the modern counterparts what we previously knew as mainframes or supercomputers.

In fact, most modern supercomputers are comprised of one or more server farms that work as a single unit to provide massive amounts of computing power.

Each unit in the cluster is a computer, usually with multiple high-speed CPUs, RAM and storage units.

A server farm may be used to power individual websites with lots of traffic, as in the case of smaller clusters, while ISPs and cloud computing service providers would need larger farms to power all of their customers.

Specialized uses include 3D rendering, scientific simulations and weather simulations.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.