Types of Servers

Servers are the foundation of business computing environments, providing compute power and storage for everything from cloud solutions and AI to applications, email, media, web content, and much more. As the volume of business data and our reliance on it continues to grow, knowing the right types of servers for your IT environment is critical to ensuring productivity, resiliency, and cost-effectiveness.

With rack servers, tower servers, modular infrastructure, and specialty servers, PowerEdge servers offer an array of solutions to meet your business needs.

Types of servers by form factor

• Tower servers. These machines resemble traditional PC cases. Each tower is a standalone server that sits on a flat surface and requires cabling, power supply, and cooling technology. Tower servers are typically used in smaller businesses that require only a few servers.
• Rack servers. These servers are designed to be mounted within a standard server rack, allowing multiple servers to be stacked vertically. Rackmount servers have a uniform width, but the height of these servers may vary from one rack unit (1U) to 4 rack units (4U), with each unit equal to 1.75 inches of vertical space. A server rack typically includes some combination of shared power, network, and storage connections for greater efficiency.
• Blade servers. A blade server is a server on a single card that can be mounted alongside other blade servers within a chassis that provides power, cooling, cabling, and KVM switching to each blade, further minimizing space requirements, and reducing cable clutter.

Cloud servers
Hybrid cloud infrastructure is essential to businesses, as 9 out of 10 cloud strategies today include on-premise data centers. Cloud-ready PowerEdge servers provide the data mobility and consistency of operation that lets administrators strategically choose where to run workloads across on-premise, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud models. Offering predictive scalability, operational flexibility, and a cyber-resilient infrastructure, PowerEdge servers modernize your business and maximize the effectiveness of your hybrid cloud strategy.

AI servers
Artificial intelligence and deep learning are transforming computing in everything from healthcare and manufacturing to business intelligence and the retail industry. AI computing requires vast amounts of parallel processing power delivered by some combination of graphics processing units (GPUs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). PowerEdge server technology offers an optimal mix of accelerator cards, storage, expandable memory, and processing power to balance throughput and computing power for deep learning.

Edge servers
Dell EMC PowerEdge XE servers are purpose-built for complex, harsh, and compute-intensive edge workloads that require high-performance and large amounts of storage. These robust servers offer the reliability and security required for demanding applications inside the data center or in extreme conditions from outside the data center to the edge of the IT infrastructure.

What are the different types of servers?
Server types are often defined by the workloads they are designed to manage - such as proxy servers, mail servers, web servers, application servers, FTP servers, real-time communication servers, and virtual servers. Servers may also be categorized by their form factor: rackmount servers, tower servers, and blade servers.

What are the benefits of different types of servers?
Tower servers provide affordable and easy-to-manage hardware for smaller businesses and organizations moving to servers for the first time, where scalability beyond two servers is not needed. Rackmount servers provide higher-density compute and storage resources and are ideal for IT environments that require substantial capabilities and multiple nodes. Blade servers are ideal for environments that require a large number of nodes of limited capability, where the physical footprint is limited.