What is the difference between Confluence "Data Center" and "Server"?

[Jan Markowski]

I'm looking to download and install Confluence, and I see two sets of *.tar.gz files: one for Data Center, and one for Server. It's not clear what the difference is between these two.

[chucktalk]

Hi Jan,

Datacenter is really meant for clients that have a large client base (thousands of users) and meant to scale and distribute the load for same. Clients that are beginning with Confluence probably want to start with the Server edition until they grow their use and instance large enough to need to scale out their deployment.

Hope that helps.

-Chuck

[Robb Wiedrich]

At what user load is it recommended to move from Server edition to Data Center edition?

We are already running JIRA Data Center with 2k licenses.  

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

For the end-user, not a lot.  They get to use Confluence.

For the back-end, Server is a single server.  You install it on a machine, run it, and you have Confluence.  

Data Centre starts off the same, but you are expected to install it on more machines, and connect them all together so that you have the same Confluence running on more than one server, providing High Availability, clustering, load, etc.  See https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center