What is the difference between a Private Cloud and Server Farm?

Question

What are the differences between a private cloud and a server farm. I've done some reading and they honestly feel like the same thing to me.

Can someone give definitions and maybe some examples that you may use one or the other?

Answer 1

Going by the definition at Wikipedia

A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers – usually maintained by an organization to supply server functionality far beyond the capability of a single machine. Server farms often consist of thousands of computers which require a large amount of power to run and to keep cool.

Server farms are created for specific purpose such as cluster computing, scientific simulation, web hosting etc. which generally requires large amount of computational power. For instance facebook has large server farms across the globe in order to host its social networking platform.

Where as a private cloud can be defined as

The private cloud is defined as computing services offered either over the Internet or a private internal network and only to select users instead of the general public. Also called an internal or corporate cloud, private cloud computing gives businesses many of the benefits of a public cloud - including self-service, scalability and elasticity - with the additional control and customisation available from dedicated resources over a computing infrastructure hosted on-premises. In addition, private clouds deliver a higher level of security and privacy through both company firewalls and internal hosting to ensure operations and sensitive data are not accessible to third-party providers.

A private cloud mostly meant for organisational use but they are not required to be a huge cluster or large data centre. A private cloud can be a single server or it can be a cluster of number of machines. Basically the concept of cloud is to enable usage of resources which are located elsewhere through internet/internal network like intranet or WAN.

For instance, a company with offices in multiple locations can set up a private cloud for there internal use, here the servers of private cloud might be located at companies head-quarters and its branch offices will be accessing the private cloud.

TL;DR: A server farms is usually large in size, mainly built for applications requiring intensive computing power or data storage(data farms). Whereas private clouds are meant for internal business and IT needs of a particular organisation where it's important to access the resources over different geo-locations, and usually they are small in size as compare to server farms.