Why servers

Most x86 servers come with a standard three-year warranty. Support in years four and five may be expensive, but customers can consider self-support or third-party maintenance to reduce those costs. After five years, replacement parts may become almost impossible to obtain. Based on these expected x86 server hardware failure rates and maintenance and part replacement, enterprises should aim to replace their x86 servers approximately 48 to 60 months after installation.

A firm plan should be in place to replace x86 services no later than the end of the fifth year. I call this a slow death because heat slowly damages the internal circuitry. It is important to have controlled cooled airflow around your computing environment. Security and critical patches are not up to date. There are patches released daily and many are difficult to install and manage. In many cases patches can have an ill effect on applications running on the server.

Improperly installed software. Missing drivers, dll or any other file can use a server to crash if an application is not installed correctly. Without regular monitoring of the server, log files grow.

Eventually you run out of space causing the server to fail. Have you ever noticed how slow your PC becomes as it ages? The same thing happens with servers. You need to perform regular maintenance on your servers.

Applications installed on the server without any awareness or recognition of other applications installed. This causes applications to starve for resources, slowing down performance and in many cases crashing the server. Having everything in one place makes it easier to configure and support for a large group of people. Collaboration — Saving files and other things onto a server makes collaborating with other people much easier.

Everyone can access the same information and work together on projects. Types of Servers There are several different ways to classify servers based on type. How to Keep Servers Safe As with any type of computing device, you need to make sure you keep your servers safe.

The following are some of the most common ways to store and protect servers: Data Center Servers — Most servers are in large data centers with lots of other equipment.

The servers are securely kept in server racks , which make it easier to manage the device while keeping it safe. Server racks often have locks that can help to add an additional layer of protection. Servers on Desks — While not nearly as common, some companies do have their servers sitting on a desk like a normal computer.

Keeping the room locked is a good start for protecting the server. However, there are different types of racks specifically for servers on desks or to keep your server right next to you. The fact that many servers look quite similar to normal PCs can also help to disguise its value.

A core question for anyone in the IT industry is "What is a server? Harlan Gatlin. Application servers run applications in lieu of client computers running applications locally. Application servers often run resource-intensive applications that are shared by a large number of users. Doing so removes the need for each client to have sufficient resources to run the applications. It also removes the need to install and maintain software on many machines as opposed to only one.

Domain Name System DNS servers are application servers that provide name resolution to client computers by converting names easily understood by humans into machine-readable IP addresses. The DNS system is a widely distributed database of names and other DNS servers, each of which can be used to request an otherwise unknown computer name.

When a client needs the address of a system, it sends a DNS request with the name of the desired resource to a DNS server. Mail servers are a very common type of application server.

Mail servers receive emails sent to a user and store them until requested by a client on behalf of said user. Having an email server allows for a single machine to be properly configured and attached to the network at all times. It is then ready to send and receive messages rather than requiring every client machine to have its own email subsystem continuously running.

A web server is a special kind of application server that hosts programs and data requested by users across the Internet or an intranet. Web servers respond to requests from browsers running on client computers for web pages, or other web-based services. The amount of data used by companies, users, and other services is staggering. Much of that data is stored in databases. Databases need to be accessible to multiple clients at any given time and can require extraordinary amounts of disk space.

Both of these needs lend themselves well to locating such databases on servers. Database servers run database applications and respond to numerous requests from clients. Virtual servers are taking the server world by storm. Unlike traditional servers that are installed as an operating system on machine hardware, virtual servers exist only as defined within specialized software called hypervisor.

Each hypervisor can run hundreds, or even thousands, of virtual servers all at once. The hypervisor presents virtual hardware to the server as if it were real physical hardware. The virtual server uses the virtual hardware as usual, and the hypervisor passes the actual computation and storage needs onto the real hardware beneath, which is shared among all the other virtual servers.

A proxy server acts as an intermediary between a client and a server. Often used to isolate either the clients or servers for security purposes, a proxy server takes the request from the client. Instead of responding to the client, it passes the request on to another server or process.

The proxy server receives the response from the second server and then replies to the original client as if it were replying on its own. In this way, neither the client nor the responding server needs to directly connect to each other. Some servers exist to monitor or manage other systems and clients. There are many types of monitoring servers. Several of them listen to the network and receive every client request and server response, but some do not request or respond to data themselves.

In this way, the monitoring server can keep track of all the traffic on the network, as well as the requests and replies of clients and servers, without interfering with those operations. A monitoring server will respond to requests from monitoring clients such as those run by network administrators watching the health of the network.

The concept of servers is nearly as old as networking itself. After all, the point of a network is to allow one computer to talk to another computer and distribute either work or resources. Computing has evolved since then, resulting in several types of server structures and hardware. You could say that the original servers, mainframe computers, and later, minicomputers, handled almost all computing tasks except the interaction with the user through a screen and keyboard, which was left to the client system.

The next major wave of servers included computer-based servers. In many respects, these servers were nothing more than larger, more powerful desktop computers. Such servers were generally more expensive and held far more memory and disk space than most client computers. Each server was still a self-contained unit with its own motherboard, processor, memory, disk drives, and power supply.

Servers like this were often warehoused in air-conditioned rooms called server rooms, and were later bolted into racks for better storage and accessibility. The original computer server hardware was large and stored in racks that could hold hundreds of pounds. Over time, however, faster means of connecting hardware resulted in parts of the server being extracted from a single self-contained device.

By removing hard drives, eliminating internal cooling, and the ongoing miniaturization of computing parts, servers were eventually reduced to a single thin server known as a blade server.