Racks for Geeks

Dell Power Edge

The word 'Racks' has been around in slang for quite a while. A 'nice rack' is often a reference to a slightly more than adequate bosom. Racks can also be a reference to food. Ribs are also called racks. But alas, to geeks it means not an indulgence in ogling or eating. Racks mean servers. Yes! Rack servers or rack-mounted servers as they are properly called, are the kind of computers your ISP or large companies have. It basically serves data to other computers. Much of the work it does is to decide which computer gets what data at what time. It can also serve as storage, the way most enterprises use them. If you're blogging or using social networking sites, they're hosted from servers that store their data. When you browse a webpage, much of what you see gets dished out by a server.


Water is stored by the dam and released only to the level needed to meet the demand. Servers behave in a similar fashion. It acts to control the flow of data or store it. From acting like web traffic controllers to storing the bits and pieces of your favorite websites, servers get a lot of work done in the background without you knowing it. With so much technology in these things, it's no wonder that geeks have a natural attraction to racks. 


Some famous racks are even tourist attractions. Take for example the servers that hosts different open source projects in Oregon State's Open Source Labs. Visiting geeks have their pictures taken with the racks serving their pet projects. LOL!


So the next time you overhear a geek say, 'Nice Racks!' better be on the look out for a geek checking out hardware of the computer kind.