A
duplicate of the
contents of a
server on a
network. Users asking for the
data located on the mirrored server are then redirected (automatically or manually) to a mirror that is network-topologically closer to them, thereby relieving network
load.
Mirroring is also used on servers and individual
hard drives in conjunction with a
load-balancing device to establish a form of
distributed computing: incoming service requests are distributed between the available resources by the load-balancing device.