Basically, a sysadmin is responsible for their company's I.T. services. Employees need these I.T. services so that they can be productive. This includes things like email, file storage, running a website and more. The services have to be stored somewhere, they don't just appear out of nowhere. Any thoughts on where they're stored? If you answered servers, you're correct. We talked about servers in an earlier course and you've learned that the term servers can have multiple meanings. In one course we discussed how servers have web content that they serve to other computers. In another course, we talked about how servers can be software that perform a certain function. In this video, we're going to talk about servers more in-depth because, in many cases sysadmins are responsible for maintaining all of the company's servers. If you're working as an I.T. support specialist and have systems administration responsibilities, these tasks could be something you'll perform. A server is essentially software or a machine that provides services to other software or machines. For example, a web server stores and serves content to clients through the Internet. You can access the web server through a domain name like google.com. We'll dive deeper into web servers in a later course. Right now, let's run down some other examples of servers. An email server, provides email service to other machines. And an SSH server provides SSH services to other machines and so on and so forth. We call them machines that use the services provided by a server, clients. Clients request the services from a server and in turn, the servers respond with the services. A server can provide services to multiple clients at once and the client can use multiple servers. Any computer can be a server. I can start up a web server on my own home computer that would be able to serve my own personal website on the internet for me. But, I don't really want to do that because I have to leave my computer on all the time in order for my website to be available all the time. Industry Standard Servers are typically running 24 seven and they don't run dinky little hardware like my home laptop. They run on a really powerful and reliable hardware. Server hardware can come in lots of different forms. They can be towers that sit upright, they look very similar to the desktops we've seen. Those towers can be put in a closet or can sit on the table if you want them to. But, what if you needed to have 10 servers? The towers would start taking up way too much space. Instead, you can use rack servers which lay flat and are usually mounted in a 90 inch wide server rack. If you needed even more space, you could use blade servers that are even slimmer than racks. There are other types of form factors for servers but these are the most common ones. You can also customize the hardware on your servers depending on the services. For example, on a file server you'll want more storage resources so that you can store more files. What about connecting to our servers? Working in a small IT organization, you could potentially deal with a handful of servers. You don't want to have a monitor, keyboard and a mouse for each of these servers, do you? Fortunately, you don't have to thanks to something we learned in an earlier course. We can remotely connect to them with something like SSH. Even so, you should always have a monitor keyboard on hand. Sometimes when you're working your network might be having issues and SSH won't be an option. A common industry practice is to use something known as a KVM Switch. KVM stands for keyboard, video and mouse. A KVM Switch looks like a hub that you can connect multiple computers to and control them using one keyboard, mouse and monitor. You can read more about using KVMs in the next supplemental reading. Now though we've got a better understanding of servers and what they do, you can go out and start buying server hardware and setting up services for your organization. Or maybe not. You don't actually have to buy your own server hardware or even maintain your own services. In the next video, were going to learn about a wave of computing that started to overtake the IT world, cloud computing. See you there.