Would a company be interested in increasing their worker productivity and decreasing costs? Of course they would! What company wouldn’t be interested in cutting costs and increasing productivity. While there are many ways and opinions about the best way to cut costs, we are going to talk about one of the least expensive and popular ways to do this, a server farm. When you are finished reading this article you will be equipped with a few of the tools necessary to reduce company costs. With all of that being said, lets go ahead and get started and save some money!

You may have heard the term “server farm” and scratched your head thinking are there animals on this “farm”? Well, the answer is no, there are no farm animals running around here! A server farm or cluster, as it is called, is comprised of servers that can range in number from a few servers to thousands of servers. And all the servers are located in a single location. Server farms are equipped with the task and primary goal of distributing data requests across multiple servers more quickly than a single server is capable of doing.

There are a few basic tools that are needed to create a server farm. Don’t worry about us getting to technical. Our primary goal is to cover the basics of a server farm so you have a better understanding of how a server farm works. The first device you are going to need are the servers themselves. Server farms typically consist of a few servers all the way up to thousands of servers! Regardless if you network has 2 servers or 2000 servers the basics are the same across the board. Once you know the number of servers that are in your network the next step is to physically connect the Ethernet cables from the servers to your 24 port Ethernet hub (if you have more than 24 servers in your farm you will need to get 2 or 3 or more 24 port Ethernet hubs). The next step is to connect the Ethernet, or fiber cable from one 24 port Ethernet hub to the next hub. You keep connecting the cables between the hubs until all the hubs are connected to each other via the cables. Next, after the physical connections have been made between all the hubs you physically connect the cables from the primary 24 port hub to your router. You now have in place all the ingredients to create a server farm!