A group of network servers that are housed in one location. A server farm provides bulk computing for specific applications such as Web site hosting, whereas while a datacenter has many servers, it also has people. In a server farm, you would generally only see a person when an installation or repair was performed, while in the datacenter, operators would be sitting at consoles, putting paper in printers and possibly moving disks and tapes from one place to another. A server farm is typically a room with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of rack-mounted servers humming away. They might all run the same operating system and applications and use load balancing to distribute the workload between them. See clustering, darkened datacenter and telecom hotel.
 | Reproduced with permission from Computer Desktop Encyclopedia. Copyright (c) 1981-2009 The Computer Language Company Inc. All rights reserved. |
Additional Resources
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