From the course: Server Administration Essential Training

Server form factors - Windows Server Tutorial

From the course: Server Administration Essential Training

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Server form factors

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- [Narrator] The term form factor when it comes to computers refers to the size, shape, and the overall packaging of the computer device itself. Now, servers typically come in one of three different form factors. The first is what's called the tower server. Now, this particular type of server probably isn't that unfamiliar to you, or really most people, because it is very similar to your typical desktop tower computer, it's still same kind of large rectangular box that is designed to hold all the various components for the computer. You want to keep in mind, that the one big issue with having a tower server is that it takes up a lot of space. And so it's typically only going to be found in a smaller company that requires fewer servers. Now, one big difference that I do want you to understand, especially if you're going to attempt let's say, to build your own server, is that you want to look for special server features in a tower that's built for a server. A couple of these features would be redundant power supplies, 'cause your servers are very important. So if a power supply fails, you don't want the server to fail with it. And the ability to have hot-swappable components so that you can trade things out without having to shut down the computer. The second form factor that we'll find in our servers are rack mount servers. And I mentioned with the tower servers, we really can only have a small number for it to make sense. Well, the idea behind a rack mount server is that it is designed to save space. Okay, we end up having these servers, which are thin and wide, and they slide in and out of a rack cabinet. All right, now these racks are typically 19 inches wide, that's a very standard width that you'll find with these, and the height of both the individual servers and the actual rack itself is measured using something called rack units. Now one unit is equal to approximately 1.75 inches in height. And your rack mount servers, you'll very typically find them to be rated somewhere in the 1U-4U, okay, which stands for one unit, which would be 1.75 inches high, to 4U, okay, which would you just do the math, that would be about seven inches high, you don't want to get much bigger than that. But sometimes they are, this is what you're going to find when you're looking at your rack mount servers. Now, one thing you really have to keep in mind with these rack mount servers is even though they are designed to hold more servers in an enclosed space than you'd have with your tower servers, well, each server still is kind of an independent machine. And so each one is going to have a lot of independent cables coming out of the back. And so we have to use these cable management arms so that when you're sliding these rack servers in and out, the cables are guided appropriately. But keep in mind, if you ever look at the back of a rack mount server rack, you're going to see a lot of cables. Well, that leads us into the third form factor, the use of blade technology or your blade servers. And this is the technology would use for the largest number of servers housed in the smallest location. Now, why is this? Well, first of all, these blades are very thin, because the server, the entire server is actually contained on a single card. And then that card is mounted alongside other blade servers, right? So you have a whole bunch of these blade servers altogether, in a single blade chassis. Now let's talk about this blade chassis or we'll call it blade enclosure. I mentioned with the rack mount servers, all the cables. Well here with the blade technology, we have a single power supply, a built in KVM, which stands for keyboard video mouse, okay, so it's just one single keyboard, one monitor, one mouse that controls all these different cards or these different blade servers, and therefore you put all that together, you end up with minimal cables. Okay, so you can have a very neat and organized system with a lot of server power. All right, so those are the three primary form factors that you'll find with your servers. And so now you know what kind you're going to want to get based upon the needs of your organization.

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