Colocation A building that is constructed or rebuilt for datacenters. Also
known as a carrier hotel, co-location center or Internet datacenter,
telecom hotels typically house hundreds and thousands of Web servers
for Web hosting organizations, large enterprises and other service organizations.
See server farm.
Server farm A group of network servers that are housed in one location. A server
farm provides bulk computing for specific applications such as Web site hosting,
whereas while a datacenter has many servers, it also has people. In a server
farm, you would generally only see a person when an installation or repair
was performed, while in the datacenter, operators would be sitting at consoles,
putting paper in printers and possibly moving disks and tapes from one place
to another. A server farm is typically a room with dozens, hundreds or even
thousands of rack-mounted servers humming away. They might all run the same
operating system and applications and use load balancing to distribute the
workload between them. See clustering, darkened datacenter and telecom hotel.
Darkened datacenter Unattended datacenter operation. With printers distributed throughout
the enterprise and the use of tape and optical libraries that automatically
mount the appropriate disk and tape volume, the datacenter increasingly does
not require human intervention. See server farm and green datacenter.
Green datacenter A datacenter that is constructed to run as economically as possible.
All computer, electrical and lighting systems, as well as the building materials,
must be rated for maximum efficiency. The datacenter may also be augmented with
solar panels.
