>> Now that's reliability engineering for ya.
> 
> Indeed. That's another important differentiation.

Even today, I see people selling "servers" which are really like 
"desktops". (1.2 GHz Intel Celeron with 512 MB RAM? I don't think so...)

I think the "real" difference between a desktop and a server is probably 
fault-tolerance. When I first joined the 2-bit company I'm with now, we 
had a server with a 500 MHz AMD Thunderbird CPU and 128 MB RAM. Now we 
also had 4 GHz Intel Pentium IV workstations with 256 MB RAM in the lab, 
which makes a bit of a mockary of the "server" tag. But the lab PCs 
didn't have multiple Ultra320 SCSI HDs, hardware RAID controllers, 
redundant PSUs or 30,000 cooling fans. But the "servers" did. ;-)

(Seriously, it didn't have 30,000 cooling fans, but it did have *a lot* 
Probably way, way more than necessary, IMHO...)

The HP ProLiant I was briefly in charge of was really nice, actually. It 
had a little diagram on the front showing the system board, and a little 
red LED for every component on it for which a failure sensor exists.

It has ECC RAM, and yet it has multiple RAM banks, and it can compare 
them and tell you if one RAM bank is faulty. (I gather this works in up 
to a 4-way configuration, for 4x RAM redundancy, in case the ECC doesn't 
catch it. Oh, and the RAM is hot-swap. HOT-SWAP!)

It also has more fans than it is sane for any one device to have... 
although... it is quite a small form-factor, so maybe it does need it, 
actually.

Also has hot-swap HD bays with indicator lights. The RAID software even 
has a function to make the lights change colour so you can yank the 
correct unit. (Nice!)

And as if all that wasn't enough, there's a second computer inside it 
which you can use remotely to manage the server. Do stuff like see the 
video output, control the keyboard and mouse, and even make the main 
computer think there's a CD in the drive when really it's an ISO image 
you're serving from your remote control PC. So you literally turn the 
server on and off, fiddle with the BIOS and install the OS, all without 
ever physically being in the same country.

Some day I may own a desktop computer which makes this server's dual 
quad-core Xeons seem puny and pathetic. But it won't have reliability 
and management features like a "server" does.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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