What is a Server and How Does a Server Work
What is a Server?
A server is a hardware device that can accept or respond to requests over a network. The term ‘server’ is defined as a computer system, which receives data or web files and sends them to the client. A server communicates the information with other computers within a network by connecting either through a wide area network or a local area network. Any IT infrastructure requires using the server to make the business operations smoothly and efficiently. It’s essential to deploy the server properly across your business infrastructure to store and access the data easily without interruptions.
Server Functionalities
A server is responsible for sending the collected data across the business network. Here, the network could be a local network or a wider or large enterprise network across various locations. The computer running with the right software is called a server. The servers are high-powered devices processing and storing the data for your business or enterprise applications.
How does a server work?
You’re accessing the server when you are using the internet every time. Your computer or laptop communicates with the server hosting when you enter the particular URL on the website, and it pulls the data of a website onto your device.
The simple steps of server functioning are included:
- A web page is requested by the web browser when you enter a URL on your hardware device
- A full URL is requested by the web browser for the site that it wants to be displayed
- Then, the data is sent to the server
- The web server processes the request and responds to the instruction of all required data for displaying on the site
- The data sent to the web browser and the website will be shown to you.
Why are servers in demand?
Servers feature special technology and unique hardware infrastructure to perform business or organizational functions efficiently. Because today’s IT world involves the adoption of digital technologies that necessitates the use of servers as they take requests and respond to client actions. You can easily manage heavy or complex workloads using the servers with minimized downtimes.
The hard disk storage utilization in servers is different from desktop computers, which use a single hard disk for storage or data processing. But, servers exploit the RAID controllers, which means the servers will always include multiple hard disk drives that all work simultaneously to operate the business functions appropriately with the stored data across each drive.
This feature helps users safeguard or protect business-critical data against sudden disasters or drive failures. For example, you’re running a business website that needs to be online always. Through the distributed data storage across drives, the overall operational capabilities of servers wouldn’t be impacted even if one drive has failed in the RAID configuration. There are different RAID levels, like RAID-5, RAID–10, RAID-12, etc. You can choose a particular configuration of a server as per your business needs. The maximum performance will be ensured by using the servers integrated with RAID controllers and SSDs and the CPUs and RAMs. The ample memory and processors like AMD and Intel can manage all incoming requests and perform tasks efficiently.
