Z-axis scaling

Z-axis scaling is rarely applied to applications or services. Its primary and most common usage is among databases. The idea behind this type of scaling is to distribute data among multiple servers thus reducing the amount of work that each of them needs to perform. Data is partitioned and distributed so that each server needs to deal only with a subset of the data. This type of separation is often called sharding, and there are many databases specially designed for this purpose. Benefits of z-axis scaling are most noticeable in I/O and cache and memory utilization.