The web server farm is a group of servers designated to serve up the content of the web site. A web server farm can have as little or as many servers as the load balancer can handle requests or IP addresses.

This layer is basically the hardware and the web server software running the server. Within a Microsoft solution, the administrator may choose to run Windows with Microsoft IIS server. In this case, the web server would be an Intel platform system. An alternative to this platform is to run Linux as the operating system and Apache web server as the web server software. There are also appliance based web servers such as the Cobalt web server. This server is a turnkey web server that runs their version of Linux, and is web managed hosting many different web sites from one appliance.

Vendors

Compaq
Dell
Sun Microsystems
Linux
Microsoft Windows/IIS