Linux Hardware - Servers

Linux hardware servers have the following types:

I. Commodity servers

Commodity servers are stand alone servers from hardware manufacturers which you can purchase in whole or in part. You can place several servers in a clustered environment to scale up the architecture. Usually they are cheaper due to availability and competition from manufacturers, and not necessarily of lower performance.

II. Mainframe servers

Mainframe servers are large computers that already has an extensive architecture within servers themselves. For example you may have 500 processors on a single Mainframe, clustered by nodes. Each model is usually supplied by a single manufacturer (for example IBM) where that's the only firm you can go to if you encounter build problems. It is, of course, phenomenal for huge scale processing.

III. Exalytics servers

Exalytics servers are between commodity and Mainframe servers in terms of scaling and capacity. They allow you to do more on each server without configuring a clustered environment for commodity servers, section up the servers into nodes (though not as many as a Mainframe), and generally accommodates larger scale processing. This is propelled and supported mostly by Oracle.

A mix and match of these, though not common in the requirements, is however possible.