Infrastructures & Servers Flashcards
What servers and the 2 most basic kinds?
A server is considered to have several meanings
and various roles in relation to computers. Predominantly, a
server is a piece of programming code that
provides services. This can also take the form of computers on a computer network. Additionally, it
can be defined as a computer dedicated
to running programs. There are various
types of servers, but let’s unpack the
two most common ones, web servers, and
database servers. A web server is a computer that is dedicated full-time
to hosting web pages. The internet is made up of
many computers acting as web servers connected with the appropriate
ports, and protocols. It can be a single web page of a small business running on a personal computer or a large multinational company
hosting thousands of pages. Nevertheless, it is all interconnected and
accessible to everyone. An unfavorable expression
that you may have encountered is the
server is down. This means that the computer
hosting the web pages for a company or an individual
is no longer accessible, and the service has ceased.
A database server is a machine that is dedicated to
storing information. It is connected to a network and accessed when stored
data is required.
What is backup storage on a server?
When a server goes down, the server hosting your
web page is unreachable. This may be due to a
technical error like losing an Internet connection or an issue with the computer
hosting the server. Recall that memory is either
volatile or non-volatile. In the instance that a
computer no longer runs, any data stored in
volatile memory is lost. Therefore, it is vital
to create a backup and save your memory to
secondary storage regularly. Additionally, your
server may require large amounts of data to
satisfy requested tasks. RAM is a short-term solution and its storage and memory
retention are quite limited. When faced with this issue, a business can address
the problem in two ways. The first option is to
physically acquire more storage through what is known as
direct area storage or DAS. DAS involves additional
secondary storage devices that physically connect to
the machine accessing it. Some examples include, solid-state drives
or hard disk drives, along with flash drives and legacy devices like
floppy disks and DVDs. Alternatively, another option is to make use of Cloud storage. Some major Cloud
storage providers include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and
Google Cloud Platform. Cloud computing works on the same principle as a
home database server, except it is done on
a larger scale with potentially unlimited data
restrictions available. The only limitation
is that there is a cost attached
to cloud services.
