So, now the question is what exactly is a server? Okay, well a server, you can actually think of is the physical hardware itself, the box and then the server operating system. Now, both are designed for performance, for security, for redundancy. They are both designed with these features in mind to be scalable. To perform and to serve a lot of different roles and more than one user, more than a couple of users that is what a server is. It is really a system.
Okay, this is not a box that you go out and buy, but rather it is a combination of the computer and the software that make it a server and in deciding what role that server is going to have in your business.
Servers will tend to have; it was called a server class central processing unit or CPU. For example, Intel has this Z9 chip and they have the upperton chips. Both now are 64 bit and somebody might be scratching their head, “Okay, 64bit, what…” They basically mean that it is going to be able to dress way, way…more memory than a current 32bit chips out there. And of course, you know 4 gigabytes of memory might be enough for you today, but you know down the road, you may need a 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes of memory. And, you kind of stuck around the 4 gigabyte range. Generally speaking, if you have a 32bit operating system, but this new server operating systems and this is now scaled up to 54bit, yes XP Pro had a 64bit. I never met a soul that use it, never met a soul that uses a 64bit version of XP Pro, but I think you are seeing a lot of people pick up, business starting to update. Here is a 64 bit version of that, Window Server 2008 is available on 32bit and 64bit. Windows Small Business Server 2008 will be available only in 64bit.
So, these processors are designed for that. They tend to have additional instructions to them that are related to various housekeeping tasks to servers required to do. And, they can just handle a higher utilization load, that is what they are designed for, a higher performance.
They also would rarely come with a particular kind of memory called ACC, and that is stands for Air Correcting Memory. An Air Correcting Memory is going to basically test the data coming in and out and making sure that it is flawless. So, that is a little bit more expensive than your typical RAM chips in desktop PC.
And then, they are also going to have a more sophisticated disk subsystem or hard drives. A lot of times you will hear the term RAID. Well, what does RAID stands for? It stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. And, there are different versions of them; we are just going to talk about the more common ones. First is RAID level 0 and what that does is it takes a pair of drives, hard disks, equally match in size and it says a portion of the data, each time it writes, the both disks at the same time. And so, that makes it faster, because you are getting a lot more through. Now, the problem with RAID 0 is of course, if one of the drives fails, you have lost all your data, again. They also refer that as ‘Strike Drive’ as well.
So, if you have 2 250gig drives, essentially is going to bear as 2 250gig drive that you are writing to. But, the data gets written a little bit to each one. And then, there is RAID level 1, now RAID level 1 is much more secure, it is actually a mirror. You take one drive and as being written to the data, same data means simultaneously written to the other. And so, if you have a failure of your hard drive, rather than being down until it is replaced. A lot of time, it could be hot swap. You can take the bad drive out, rebuild the mirror and off you go, but you did not have the down time that you would have in a RAID level 0 environment.
And then, there is RAID level 5, which is 3 disks or more that basically looks like the one large one drive, but you do have a level redundancy in case one of the disk go bad. Then, there is RAID level 6, there is RAID level 15, so there is different RAID, but the most common I run into in the field is the RAID level 1, which is mirrored, because that is more for redundancy and safety and eliminat
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