Server Farm

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.

Advertisements

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.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Latest Data Centers Terms

Related Reading

Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…