Server Farm

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What Does Server Farm Mean?

A server farm is a set of many servers interconnected together and housed within the same physical facility. A server farm provides the combined computing power of many servers by simultaneously executing one or more applications or services. A server farm is generally a part of an enterprise data center or a component of supercomputer.

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A server farm is also known as a server cluster or computer ranch.

Techopedia Explains Server Farm

A server farm is designed to provide a massive and redundant source of computing power for computing-intensive applications. Server farms generally consist of thousands of servers, but their size can vary in different organizations and based on underlying requirements. Each server within the server farm is networked to the others and to a central management server. The central server manages the overall operations of these servers such as assigning processes, resource balancing, scheduling, security, updates and more. Although server farms are primarily used for enterprise and scientific applications, they can also be used to provide various services, such as core computing services for the primary application (ERP/CRM), data and application backup services, load balancing and more.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

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.