Uses Of The Server

The main uses of a server are:

* File Server: File Server is used for storing and sharing files. The files placed in the mass storage server can be handled simultaneously by multiple clients.

* Print Server: Server is used as an intermediary between a set of customers, and a set of printers. Each client can send documents to print to a printer connected to the server.

* Database Server: Server is used to store and manipulate data contained in one or more databases and shared among several clients. Databases can be flat structure databases (non-relational database management system — DBMS), or can be relational database management system (RDBMS), the latter is being used widely by almost all large-scale companies and multinationals for the database needs.

* Mail server: the server is used to store and transmit electronic mail. The outgoing mail server is transmitted to the recipient. The courier arrived is stored on the server and is accessible by the client.

* Web server: the server stores and manipulates the pages of a website, and on request to the client.

* Game Server: also called the referee server, it follows the evolution of a game and brings together the various players in the multiplayer online games.

* Application Server: is a generic term to designate a server that performs the processing of one or more software applications to client / server architecture.

* Proxy: the server receives requests, and then forwards them to other servers. It can be used to expedite the processing of applications, or enforce regulations (censorship, privacy, etc.).

Example of use on the Internet: Google web application works with more than 15,000 servers in the back-end and these are grouped into clusters of 40 to 80 servers. These are stored in various data processing units all over the world.

Hardware Of A Server

A computer server is used to respond to requests via a network. Miscellaneous assemblers and manufacturers such as HP, Sun and IBM sell computers optimized for this purpose.

These machines are typically high-end designed professionally to serve many clients simultaneously. These machines are equipped with powerful processor or multiple processors. They have lots of memory and fast hard drives of very high capacity, and of course use network interfaces.

The servers are running without intervention, 24 to 24 hours, almost 99.9 percent of the time.

The servers can be mounted in 19 inch rack, which allows stacking them together. They can be equipped with devices to prevent breakdowns and loss of information, such as RAID devices: the information is copied to several hard drives in order to avoid irretrievable loss in case of failure of a hard disk.

The consolidation of multiple servers in a cluster is used to distribute the load, and ensures that customers are served even in case of a server.

A Network Attached Storage is a turnkey appliance, designed specifically as file server. There are also devices for turnkey print servers.

The servers are sometimes connected to storage networks: a set of servers are connected by a fiber optic network to a series of hard drives. The storage battery of the disk is divided into partitions divided between servers.

A device server may run multiple servers simultaneously, and typically serves many users simultaneously. A server is often manipulated, and the keyboard and the screen (if any) used mainly in the maintenance, repair and control.

A server base (in 2008) has a power of 200W with an estimated power consumption of all the computer servers at about 450 TWh in France and 4,000 TWh for the United States.

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