Partition

A partition is a portion of a system that has been divided into multiple parts. This division may be deliberate and logical, such as separating of data based on certain properties, or caused by an external event, for example a network failure that prevents network traffic from being delivered between two geographical locations.

Oftentimes it is desirable to partition a system based on various properties in order to increase performance. For example, an indexed data storage engine will partition data across multiple files, storage devices, or external systems, in order to reduce the amount of information it needs to search through for a given request