protractor without selenium server

When I issue the protractor command at the command line, with the following configuration:

I get this:

$ protractor
[12:22:23] I/launcher - Running 1 instances of WebDriver
[12:22:23] I/local - Starting selenium standalone server...
[12:22:24] I/local - Selenium standalone server started at http://10.0.0.242:55414/wd/hub
Started
.


1 spec, 0 failures
Finished in 8.223 seconds

[12:22:33] I/local - Shutting down selenium standalone server.
[12:22:33] I/launcher - 0 instance(s) of WebDriver still running
[12:22:33] I/launcher - chrome #01 passed

the problem is that it takes 5+ seconds to start up the "selenium standalone server".

Two questions - (1) do I need this server to run the tests? And (2), is there a way to run the server in the background without having to restart the server everytime?

via Alexander Mills