Servers

Servers

Servers are mainly deployed in offices and small businesses. They combine serious storage capacity and multi core processors to serve data to a large cluster of client computers and maintain optimum system performance at immensely long uptimes.

Servers are either available as a rack, or blade mounted solution, or in a normal tower case just like a normal PC. A blade server may not be as easily upgradeable in the box, but the beauty lies in its 'rackability'. This means that a number of blade servers can be daisy-chained together and their performance increased as per your network requirements. A normal server can be upgraded by adding more components into the box itself. These can also be linked together, but not at the same level of ease as a blade server, which can also be configured in a redundant array, wherein one server can be seamlessly swapped out in the event of a hardware error, as all data will have been copied across hard drives.

When choosing a server a multicore processor will be a basic requirement, at the moment four core processors are the norm but we are promised eight core processors in the very near future. A multicore CPU will make it easier on the system when more than one user are accessing it. RAID is also a very useful feature to have, not only because it usually means the hard drives will be running on the faster SATA bus, but also because, when properly configured, it can offer a large amount of security by mirroring data across drives.

Using a KVM switch, multiple servers can be accessed and configured using a single keyboard, mouse and monitor, but many servers will come with remote management, meaning the server can be configured from any computer with the right login details and rights, even from half-way across the world over the internet.

This category contains tests on Rack Server, Blade Server, Rack Servers, Blade Servers.