Through the shape and structure of the server, servers can be divided into three types: tower, rack, and blade servers. At present, the two most common types of servers on the market are tower servers and rack servers. So what is the difference between these two servers?

Tower Server

Tower servers are generally seen by everyone. Most of all, its appearance and structure are similar to ordinary PCs, except that they are slightly larger. There is no unified standard for its appearance and size. The motherboard of the tower server is highly expandable and has many slots, and a lot of space is often reserved inside the chassis of the tower server for redundant expansion of hard drives, power supplies, etc. This kind of server does not require additional equipment, does not require much space, and has good scalability and high configuration. Therefore, it has a wide range of applications and can meet the needs of common server applications. This type of server is especially suitable for common entry-level and workgroup-level server applications, and its cost is relatively low. Its performance can meet the requirements of most small and medium-sized enterprise users. There is still a huge demand in the market. However, this type of server also has many limitations. When multiple servers need to work at the same time to meet higher server application requirements, it is not suitable because it is relatively large, takes up a lot of space, and is inconvenient to manage. Rack server Rack server is actually a product under industrial standardization. Its appearance is designed according to unified standards and used uniformly with cabinets to meet the needs of enterprises for dense server deployment. The main function of the rack server is to save space. Since multiple servers can be installed in one cabinet, it not only takes up less space, but also facilitates unified management. The width of the rack server is 19 inches, and the height is in U (1U = 1.75 inches = 44.45 mm). There are usually several standard servers of 1U, 2U, 3U, 4U, 5U, and 7U. The advantage of this kind of server is that it takes up little space and is easy to manage uniformly. However, due to internal space limitations, the scalability is relatively limited. For example, most 1U servers only have 1 or 2 PCI expansion slots. In addition, heat dissipation performance is also an issue that needs attention. In addition, cabinets and other equipment are required. Therefore, this type of server is mostly used by large enterprises with a large number of servers. There are also many enterprises that use this type of server, but deliver the server to A dedicated server hosting agency is used to host the server, especially when many website servers currently use this method. Due to limitations in scalability and heat dissipation, this kind of server has limited stand-alone performance and limited application scope. It often only focuses on certain applications, such as remote storage and network services. In terms of price, rack servers are generally 20 to 30% more expensive than tower servers with the same configuration.