Server Farms

As we all know in the modern world, internet has become the primarily source of information. Each day you might browse information using search engines like google, yahoo, Baidu, MSN,..etc and retrieve millions of results in very quick time.

"Great!! I got what I need in just a split second. Now lets go ahead with my work."

But have you ever thought how you get those results so quickly? Think about your brand new Quad-Core and the amount of time it takes to process a simple search query in your hard driver. It can be from split second to may be few minutes. But when it comes to a search engine it gives you millions and millions of records in milliseconds. How they are achieving this?

The answer is server farms.

A Server farm is a large collection of computers connect together in order to meet the server needs, which are otherwise impossible to achieve. It is commonly used for cluster computing where high computational power is required. The workload is distributed among the individual components hence providing expedited computing processes. With this kind of arrangement, the computational power of the computers have gone beyond our imagination. A server farm can process a calculation which a single server will not be able to finish during its entire life time.

Still server farms are not reliable a mainframes due to multiple points of failures. However large server farms have come up with mechanisms like data redundancy, automatic switch into a redundant or standby computer and rapid reconfiguration of the server cluster.

When it comes performance of server farms, electricity and cooling factor plays the major role. In a server farm about 33% of power is consumed by a typical cooling system. and since the systems need to up and running 24X7 the electricity consumption is also very high.Therefore rather than focusing on the cost of high speed processors and the computers, most server farm owners concern about the cost of cooling systems and electricity bills that they have to pay. Due to these factors, large companies are finding ways to reduce the cost of cooling. One such method is to go for places where we have a cool climate throughout the year. At the moment Iceland which has a cool climate everyday and cheap geothermal electricity supply is building its first server farm.