The Variety of Servers

by Paul Harmon

The term "server" has become a seriously overused word. There are hardware platforms called servers and there are operating systems called servers (e.g., Windows 2000 Server). At the same time that Microsoft has called one of its 2000 systems a server, it has included a variety of utilities inside Windows that it also calls servers (e.g., Microsoft Transaction Server [MTS], Microsoft Message Server). There are standalone products like HTML servers, Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) application servers, and database servers. There are e-business frameworks or applications packaged with an MTS or EJB application server and called e-commerce servers. And, not to be left out, IBM is increasingly referring to its mainframe systems as servers.