Computers are vital to any office space or commercial building. When you go to establishments that make heavy use of computers, you will come across the terms servers and workstations. Though you come across these two terms, you might not know the differences between the two. For most people, they think that every computer user has an entire processor all to themselves. This concept is all but a fantasy when it comes to computers. The first generation of computer networks get all their processing power from a server or central mainframe. Individual workstations will be connected to this server. The main processor receives work from each workstation through the limited time that they get. This kind of processing is no longer evident with the existence of personal computers. In this modern day and age, your personal computer is your workstation. Meanwhile, servers function as central machines that feed data to workstations.
When you say servers, you are referring to computers with the purpose of handling data requests from other computers. Website servers provide the computers of visitors with data that will display the web pages. Meanwhile, the servers on the local network of your establishment or company provides files to the computers of every employee. Servers are capable of hosting applications; however, people can only access the application through their computers. Employees will not sit down and work on a server to do their job. If the job involves maintaining the server, then that is the time that they work on the server.
If you sit down on your desktop or laptop computer to create a presentation or report, you are using a workstation. In short, what these workstations do is to generate your presentation or text file for you. Basically, the computer that you use in the office to do your personal work is a workstation based on the server-workstation model. However, these days, when people say workstations, they refer to these computers as the high-end ones that carry out intensive computing tasks for them. Some of these complicated tasks include graphic rendering and design and advanced data modeling.
In terms of basic hardware, the server and the workstation is the same. From these two, you will see RAM, hard drivers, network adapters, and processors. You can even take a desktop tower and transform its software from that of a workstation to that of a server. Many companies sell hardware to ensure that servers are kept optimal. To stack server racks, you have the server blade. Often, servers do not have any video cards that you can plug into your screen. You have to understand that server administrators log into the servers using their desktops and laptops to do maintenance. You can easily transform workstations into servers. Meanwhile, you cannot expect the other way around because specialized server hardware is difficult to incorporate into workstations.