A group of servers that are housed in one facility. A server farm comprises dozens, hundreds or even thousands of rack-mounted servers, typically running the same operating system and applications. Using load balancing, the workload is distributed among all machines.
Although the terms "server farm," "disk farm" and "datacenter" are mostly synonymous, a server farm often refers to a "darkened" datacenter full of Web servers that is devoid of people except for machine repairs. A general-purpose datacenter, on the other hand, may have human operators at consoles as well as people loading paper in printers and loading and unloading optical disc and tape cartridges. See clustering, darkened datacenter and telecom hotel.
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