Rack Servers? Why?

[Anonymoususer092]

Okay, so I want to know why some major companies like Adobe and Microsoft use rack servers. I mean, all you need is some cheepo computer and install XAMP to it, then publish your HTML files inside the htdocs folder. So why do you need these fancy rack servers filling up a whole room and increasing the sound volume by like 100x?

[Alstertheonly]

Say, for example, one server will hold 500 GB of data runs on 10 GB of RAM. Adobe get a tonne of hits per yer and host loads of files. One server won't cut it. 10 servers mounted on a rack will. I believe it also allows for easier water cooling.

[blah569]

Most personal ISPs have very limited bandwidth allocation as well. You can buy a few computers and setup your favorite flavor of Linux, SSH into it, setup Apache, PHP, and PHP modules (including MySQL) - then you're set.

[XIII13]

IM(noobish)O, it would be a lot more powerful than just a regular computer. It's one thing if you're running a site that gets, I don't know, 1000 hits per year, but if you're running something like Google, just imagine how much hits they get.

I am just a noob, but it actually seems pretty obvious to me.

[Jon-86]

all tell yae why the morra ken. bit oot a it the noo

[Jessii]

At 11/7/09 09:51 PM, Jon-86 wrote: all tell yae why the morra ken. bit oot a it the noo

Drunk posting again Jon? lol

There are many reasons and it should be obvious and logical to anyone. Rack servers take up less space than just say putting a tower on the floor under your desk. Servers take a lot of energy and power and create a lot of heat. If a server happens to go down for whatever reason (hardware failure, short in the system, DOS, etc.), then there should be some sort of fail safe set up where the other servers can share the load until the other server is up and running again.

[GustTheASGuy]

I think he doesn't get why you'd not run a site on a cheap computer to begin with.

A large portal has thousands of simultaneous users, with hundreds of requests a second and needs to manage sessions for each of those users, which is more concurrent processes than a single unit can run, and upload data at a faster rate than a single hard drive can read.
If you had a single server, when you started getting too many users, your site would become slow or even unavailable. That's why you'd use many servers.