Monday, March 11, 2002		Bits & Bytes

LPAR: Short for logical partitioning, a system of taking a computer's total resources - processors, memory and storage — and splitting them into smaller units that each can be run with its own instance of the operating system and applications. Logical partitioning, which requires specialized hardware circuits, is typically used to separate different functions of a system, such as Web serving, database functions, client/server actions or systems that serve multiple time zones and/or languages.

Flat file system: A system of organising files in an operating system in which all files are stored in a single directory. In contrast to a hierarchical file system, in which there are directories and subdirectories and different files can have the same name as long as they are stored in different directories, in a flat file system every file must have a different name because there is only one list of files.