How consumers differentiate the structure of three types of servers

I believe you must have noticed that a variety of media on the tower, racks and blades of these three structures to divide the server, the shape of the server why there is such a division? The main reason is that the specific application environment is different, tower server as we usually use the same desktop, occupy a larger space, usually some small enterprises themselves to use their own maintenance, and the rack-like server as long as the desktop, can be a set on a fixed rack, so the name, It can be hosted by a professional server hosting provider, in this way, only pay a certain amount of hosting fee per year, which eliminates the inconvenience of managing the server; Blade server is a more popular server architecture in recent years, it is very thin, can be a piece of stacked on the cabinet, through the cluster technology for collaborative operation , capable of handling a large number of tasks, especially for distributed services, such as Web servers.

Read the above simple introduction, I believe you have a basic understanding of these 3 kinds of servers, the following we will come to one by one in detail, for you to do more detailed explanation:

What is a tower server:

The tower server is supposed to be the most common, it is also easiest to understand a type of server structure, because its shape and structure are similar to our normal use of the vertical PC, of course, because the server's motherboard expansion is strong, the slot is also a heap, so larger than the ordinary motherboard, As a result, the tower server's mainframe chassis is also larger than the standard ATX chassis, typically reserving enough internal space for future hardware and power redundancy expansion.

Because the tower server chassis is relatively large, the server configuration can also be very high, redundant expansion can be very complete, so its application is very wide, it should be said that the most current use of a server is the tower server. We usually say that the general server is usually a tower server, it can set a variety of common services to apply, whether it is the speed of applications or storage applications can use the tower server to solve.

For the use of objects or levels of use, the current common entry-level and workgroup servers are basically the type of server structure, some departmental applications will be used, but because there is only one host, even if there is a limit to upgrade, so in some applications need higher enterprises, Stand-alone server can not meet the requirements, the need for more than one machine work together, and the tower server is too large, independent too strong, collaborative work in space occupancy and system management are not convenient, this is the limitations of the tower server. However, generally speaking, this kind of server's function, the performance basically can satisfy most enterprise user's request, its cost is usually also relatively low, therefore this kind of server has the very widespread application support.

What is a rack server:

As a server model designed for the Internet, the rack server is a uniform design of the appearance of the server, with the cabinet unified use. It can be said that the rack-type is an optimization of the structure of the tower server, its main purpose is to minimize the use of server space, and reduce the direct benefit of space is in the computer room hosting when the price will be much cheaper.

Why is a rack-type server A server model designed for the Internet?

As we all know, many professional network equipment is the use of rack-style structure (mostly flat, like a drawer), such as switches, routers, hardware firewalls. These devices have such a structural type because they are designed according to international cabinet standards, so that everyone's flat size is basically unified, can be installed in a large vertical standard cabinet. The advantages of this is very obvious: on the one hand, can make the equipment occupy the smallest space, on the other hand, it is easy to connect with other network equipment and management, at the same time the room will appear neat and beautiful.

The rack server has a width of 19 inches, a height of u (1u=1.75 inch = 44.45 mm), and usually 1u,2u,3u,4u,5u,7u several standard servers. Cabinet size is also the use of common industrial standards, usually ranging from 22U to 42U; In the Cabinet, the U's height has removable sliding frame, the user can adjust the height flexibly according to the elevation of the server, to hold the server, the hub, the disk array cabinet and other network equipments. After the server is placed, all of its I/O line from the rear of the cabinet out (all the interface of the rack server is also in the rear), unified placement in the Cabinet of the slot, the general stickers have labels, easy to manage.

Now many Internet Web servers are actually managed by professional agencies, the website operator actually only maintains the website page, the hardware and the network connection is entrusted to the custodian organization, therefore, the trustee organization will collect the expense according to the managed server's height, the 1U server collects in the hosting the expense to be much cheaper than 2U , which is why the server for this structure is now widely used in the Internet business.

One more thing to say is that the rack-like server, because the space is much smaller than the tower server, so this type of server in terms of scalability and heat dissipation are subject to certain restrictions, accessories also have to pass a certain screening, generally can not achieve too complete equipment expansion, so the single machine performance is relatively limited, the scope of application is relatively limited, can only focus on one aspect of the application, such as Remote Storage and the provision of Web services, but because many accessories can not use the type of Tower server of the ordinary type, and its own small space advantages, so the rack-type server is generally more than the same configuration of the tower server expensive 20–30%. As for the problem of extensibility caused by small space, also is not completely unable to solve, because adopts the way of cabinet installation, so adding a host in the cabinet is a very easy thing, and then through the server cluster technology can achieve the enhancement of processing capacity, if the use of external expansion cabinets can also achieve large-scale expansion, However, because the performance of the rack-only server is limited, so after the expansion is also a unilateral ability to be multiplied, so this type of server is only in a certain kind of application of a better, we will be zoned as a functional server, the server is more targeted, generally can not move to do it.