[Wikipedia-l] Servers

[Merritt L. Perkins]

          Servers
          I have wanted a simple easy to understand description of what
servers are and what they do.  Here is what I have figured out.
          After reading the discussions about servers I looked in
catalogs and read the descriptions of the servers that they had to offer.
 A server is very much like an ordinary personal computer except it is
larger and may have several very large hard drives to provide a lot of
memory.  There has to be some way that other servers or computers can
connect to it and communicate with it.  An ordinary personal computer
could be used as a server but it couldn't store very much information.
          One server model may have a full tower case, large power
supply, special motherboard with two to four microprocessors, and six
10,000 rpm SCSI hard drives four of which are hot-swappable (can be
changed while the server is operating).  They cost about $6,000.
          Several servers may be involved in routing a call from your
computer to its destination.  One server may be able to handle the calls
from several computers at the same time.  A group of several servers may
be located in one place and do different things and more than one can be
loaded with the same data so that if one server fails another can take
over or more than one server can share the traffic.
      As the Encyclopedia gets larger and activity increases Wikipedia
will probably need more and more server capacity.
          Merritt L. Perkins            
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