Servers and Workstations.

In most common use, server is a physical computer (a computer hardware system) dedicated to running one or more such services (as a host), to serve the needs of users of the other computers on the network. Depending on the computing service that it offers it could be adatabase server, file server, mail server, print server, web server, or some other kind of server.

A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has also been used to refer to a mainframe computer terminal or a PC connected to a network.

Presently, the workstation market is highly commoditized and is dominated by large PC vendors, such as Dell and HP, selling Microsoft Windows/Linux running on Intel Xeon/AMD Opteron. Alternative UNIX based platforms are provided by Apple Inc.