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Definitions

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 generally only see a person when an installation or repair is performed; while in the datacenter, operators sitt 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 among them. See darkened datacenter.

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.