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  1. What are mounted servers and are there any other types of servers too?
  2. What are different configuration? I have heard about RAID. Is this the way multiple servers are connected to form a single server cluster? What are other options?
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  • If this is not a good question can you please also mention why? If its a duplicate kindly share the link for the other. thanks
    – muasif80
    Jun 12, 2020 at 6:45
  • Do you mean rack-mounted servers? as in servers put into large equipment racks horizonally to allow more equipment in the same footprint compared to 'floor standing' servers, which are kind of like big desk-side computers?
    – Chopper3
    Jun 12, 2020 at 9:02
  • This was the exact question from my fellow "quick question. we are looking at getting mounted servers to replace the test and prod servers. would it be beneficial to use a raid configuration for the drive or will that affect what we are doing?" I will get more info from him. I suggested that RAID configuration probably provides better performance in terms of throughput and about mounted servers, i was not clear what he was asking about. But I will check with him for more details.
    – muasif80
    Jun 12, 2020 at 9:06
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    Mounted can be short for rack mounted - for use in datacenters servers come not in free standing tower housing but in rack mount (pizza box) format for placement in a 19 inch server cabinet en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/19-inch_rack
    – Bob
    Jun 12, 2020 at 9:06
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    Your second question is two really; RAID has a few main benefits - it adds a degree of data-integrity (it's not a backup though ok), and it allows you to pool disks to have larger volumes and in most cases to get better performance than a single disk. The second part is about 'cluster file systems' which join up multiple server's local disks (in RAID or not) to act as one big shared file system, this has become quite common with lots of different flavours of this - you don't generally get better performance as the servers end up talking over quite slow links, but you can get huge volumes.
    – Chopper3
    Jun 13, 2020 at 13:04

1 Answer 1

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A mounted server is not a type of server.

In the context of your question a mounted server is likely a server who's disk or filesystem is accessible and in use by another server - for example it would be "correct enough" to say" NFS server X is mounted on server Y, where you most likely mean the filesystem of server X can be accessed by server Y.

RAID stands for "redundant array if inexpensive disks", and means exactly that - taking multiple disks and making them appear as a single large disk. There are different types of RAID depending on what combination if speed, reliability and size of disk you want. Importantly, RAID describes disk layout, not the way the disks are exposed to other machines. It exists at a block level (is like a raw disk or partition - something you can then put a filesystem on, where the filesystem just thinks its on a disk or partition)

Both of your questions appear to be conflating disk/storage with servers. While servers can certainly be dedicated to supply disk resources this is not normally the primary role if them.

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  • Ok thank you for the nice explanation. Yes I actually don't work in servers/systems very much. But now I want to develop some knowledge around them.
    – muasif80
    Jun 12, 2020 at 8:17

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