Server Farm

Server Farm or Server Cluster is the group of networked servers used for furnishing the server requirements. A server farm can be a collection of thousands of computer systems that require heavy power flow to run and keep cool. Usually, a server farm is maintained by an enterprise to cater to the server requirements. Broadly, it is used for cluster computing.

Heavy cost is associated with a server farm. Backup servers are also incorporated in a server farm, which helps in an odd situation where the primary server gets failed. A server farm streamlines the internal processes by disseminating the workload among different farm components. Typically, a server farm is used with routers or network switches for establishing a connection between different clusters and the users of the cluster. In a server room or data center, all the components, such as systems, routers, power supplies are mounted in 19-inch racks.

Now a day, most of the advanced supercomputers comprise of server farms that are connected by Gigabit Ethernet, Infiniband, Myrinet, etc. Web farm or web server hosting is a common use of a server farm. Server farms are also used in other domains, such for computational fluid dynamics and 3D computer generated imagery.

To evaluate the per watt performance in a server farm various benchmarks are used, such as: EEMBC EnergyBench, Transaction Processing Performance Council, and SPECpower. Many of the servers are added with power tracking hardware that gives understanding to the user that how much power is used by an individual server. Data center infrastructure efficiency and Power usage effectiveness are the terms used to evaluate the power used by the complete server farm.