Servers

Servers

Servers in a datacentre
Servers in a datacentre

Defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Computing (Oxford,2008), a server is a computer or device on a network that manages network resources. There are many different types of server, each with their own purpose, a few good examples of such are:

File server: a computer and storage device dedicated to storing files. Any user on the network can store files on the server.

Print server: a computer that manages one or more printers, and a network server is a computer that manages network traffic.

Database server: a computer system that processes database queries.

Web servers: are computers that deliver (serves up) Web pages. Every Web server has an IP address and possibly a domain name. For example, if you enter the URL http://www.mywebsite.com/index.html in your browser, this sends a request to the Web server whose domain name is mywebsite.com. The server then fetches the page named index.html and sends it to your browser (Pabst, 1998).

Any computer can be turned into a Web server by installing server software and connecting the machine to the Internet. There are many Web server software applications, including public domain software from NCSA and Apache, and commercial packages from Microsoft, Netscape and others.

Server specifications differ vastly depending upon what the server is going to be used for, as mentioned above any computer can be turned into a server with the right software, this doesn't always mean that the computer will be well enough equipped to deal with all of the requests an end user might make.

Servers are often dedicated, meaning that they perform no other tasks besides their server tasks. On multiprocessing operating systems, however, a single computer can execute several programs at once. A server in this case could refer to the program that is managing resources rather than the entire computer and is called a virtual server.