Hello ktimez readers today’s topic is what is server??
Server is a basically a dedicated computer that provides services on behalf of the clients, such as ordinary computers or workstations. So it’s centralized machine where clients connect to, either over internet or in a local area network, The clients connect to the server for a specific service.
Small Organization and Large Organization Server explained
For example that service could be retrieving a website, to access data or email and so on, and also a server could be a dedicated to handle one of these services only, and where you would have one server that is dedicated for a website, one for a data storage and a server for email. This model is what larger organization use. Or you can also set up a server to handle each of these services on the same machine which is what typically happens in small organizations. So depending upon which setup is used it all depends on the needs of an organization. When people talk about server generally they are referring to a powerful centralized computer that a client connects to over a network, and they would be correct on that.
Server
Server is not just a physical computer, A server is actually a role that a computer takes.
Because any computer can be set as a server it doesn’t necessarily have to be a powerful computer.
Home network
For example you can set up a network in your home where you can have an ordinary computer server as a file server. That computer would have those files In a shared folder and then other computer can connect to it to access those file. Or you can use a desktop computer to serve as a web server, Where you would install the website data on that computer and then other computers can connect to it and retrieve the webpage. However desktop computers do have they limitations because they are not designed to handle a large workload and they can’t handle a lot of incoming connections from users. This is not only because of their inferior hardware, but it’s also because of software. Because desktop operating system are only able to handle a limited amount of concurrent connections.
Servers need to be up and running 24/7 because they vital to an organization. And if a server does goes down then that could jeopardize a business or an organization. This is why servers need to be more reliable. They need to be build with robust hardware that’s able to run non-stop with little to no downtime.
For example a Desktop computer would use a processor that’s designed obviously for desktops such as Intel core series processors. And a server would use a processor designed for servers such as the intel Xeon processor. A server processor needs to be fast and had ability to perform a lot of tasks simultaneously. Both of these processors are powerful but there are some differences.
Computer Processors vs Server Processors
For example Xeon processors support a multi processing environment. So they are designed to work with other processors. Which means that you can put two or more Xeon processor on a motherboard designed for servers, which is what a lot of server need to handle a large workload, Desktop computers processors doesn’t support this, they are only designed to work by themselves and not with other processors.
The Xeon processor support Error-Correcting Code (ECC) RAM and this type of Memory are those are mainly used in severs.
Server need to be up and running 24/7 and memory errors could bring down a server and what that ECC does it detects if the data was correctly processed by the RAM module and it makes a correction if it needs to prevent memory errors.
Using Error-Collection Code memory in server is just an extra precaution to guard any errors to prevent a server from shutting down.
The inter processors doesn’t support Error-Collecting Code RAM, but the AMD processor does support it, Xeon processors can also support a large amount of RAM, They would have a large cache memory and they would also have higher core count than desktop processor.
Server should have a hot swappable hard disk drives in RAID configuration because if a hard drive were to fail then no data loss happen the server will be still up and running because of RAID.
What is RAID?
RAID : RAID is a server configuration that enable a copies of data on multiple disk and if one disk fail then it can be removed without shutting down the server. RAID will rebuild the data on the new hard disk automatically.
Servers should also have a redundant power supplies to keep the server up and running in case of power supply failure.
The server also need to use a server operating system, such as Linux, Windows Server, mac OS server .
Server Operating system are robust and stable because they are designed to run non-stop and are able to handle thousands of concurrent connections.
There are many different types of Servers When I say the type I mean the service that the server can provide.
1.Web Server
Web Server: is a server that hosts a website means that any website that you got to with your web browser when you are connecting over internet to that web server to pull up a website you want. A Web server will contain all of the website’s data including HTML codes , images, videos and it will be running on the web server software.
2.Mail Server
Mail Server: This facilitate in sending and receiving email and you would access the email using your web browser or you can also use email client like Outlook or Thunderbird using email protocols IMAP,P0P and SMTP.
3.Database Server
Database Server: is another type of Server, this type of server stores data on the backend and then it’s retrieved from computers on the frontend, You can use queries such as SQL in order to retrieve those data from database server and pass them to the frontend.
Theses are just few examples of what servers do but there is a lot more.
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