server farm
A server farm is a type of cluster consisting of several or many servers connected to form a logical system. The advantage of server farms lies in their central administration and horizontal scalability, which enable fast and easy adaptation to growth and changing customer requirements by adding a new server.
Redundant design of the infrastructure, such as double cabling, redundant power supply and network connection, ensures a high level of fail-safety. The individual servers of a server farm are designed for a wide range of functions. For example, they can support teleservices with telephone and fax, data services for telnet and file transfer, mail services for e-mails, or webservices for the DNS system or for websites.
Server farms improve the use of IT resources, they increase the availability, performance and security of web-based applications. With the help of load balancing, content switches and the integration of caches, web content up to streaming media can be transmitted directly. Parallel server structures with server appliances offer extremely high data throughput and enable simultaneous access by many users.