Reviews and tips for you - What is the difference between Server and Workstation?

What is the difference between Server and Workstation?

A Workstation is a high-end computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Workstations are intended primarily to be used by one person at a time and can be connected to the Local Area Network (LAN) to access network resources.

Workstations usually have a great processor power and a high end graphic card. Workstations are common used on simulation projects, CAD(Computer aided design), animations and so on.

For example, Pixar used more than 100 Sun Workstation to render images for Toy Story Movie. Pixar and SUN joined to create a RenderFarm made of more than 80 dual-processor machine and more than 30 four-processor SPARCStation. Each frame rendered used up 300 megabytes of data (the capacity of a good-sized PC hard disk of 1995) and required from two to 13 hours for final processing.

As you can see, workstations are used for high CPU / GPU tasks. A workstation would be a dream for any hard core gamer.

Workstation used to be really huge and hot devices. Now days there are mobile workstations like HP Compaq Mobile Workstation series . Imagine how fast your games would run on that machine.

A Server is a computer dedicated to providing one or more services over a computer network, typically through a request-response routine. Servers are usually used through networks by several users at the same time.

Servers can have huge disk capacity to store user’s data, great amount of memory to allocate several users process and high redundancy which allow them to achieve a high fault-tolerant features. For example, servers can have two power supplies so when one of them fails, the servers can be online using another. Also, server’s hard disk forms a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) that can protect user data from a single disk failure. Servers run an special operative system that allow them to achieve high performance task without compromise stability or security (MS Windows Server 2003 or some linux distros)

Servers are used to host web pages (web servers), solve domain names to IP address (DNS) , store tons of user data (Storage Servers), run databases and organize data in tables (SQL Servers, Oracle Servers), implement access control to user’s data (Active Directory Server) and so on. Servers are the IT core of the company and they should have strict physical and logical security policies.

Wikipedia is based on more than 300 web and database servers. Their web servers are apache and their database is mysql. This is one of the biggest open source implementation, an example to the world. Remember, apache servers accept requests from users get data from the database servers (mysql) and format the requests back to the users.

Servers can be as robust and expensive as you whish, take a look at Amazon’s offers for brand-new HP Server .

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