Top 7 Reasons to Remove Orphan Servers from the Data Center Floor
Posted on Mon, Mar 15, 2010 @ 09:25 AM
If a business could identify the servers doing productive work and turn off its non-productive ones, it could save 20 to 40 percent of energy use while reducing the infrastructure cooling load. When you consider that each watt of IT energy requires at least as much energy in infrastructure support, a huge potential for savings and energy reduction exists without a risk to day-to-day operations.
Here are seven reasons to remove orphan servers from the data center floor:
1. Be Net Productive – nonproductive servers are net consumers of power, space, and cooling rather than producers. They increase energy costs while providing little to no return on investment (ROI). Clearly, shutting them down reduces energy waste and increases the value of the data center.
2. Quick Win Project – eliminating unused servers is a short-term project that requires no additional hardware investment. It becomes a “quick win” project that yields a measurable increase in ROI, data center efficiency, and an extended future savings in energy costs.
3. Increase PUE and DCiE Accuracy – organizations rely on industry-standard efficiency metrics like power usage effectiveness (PUE) and data center infrastructure efficiency (DCiE) to determine the effectiveness of their energy management. Terminating unnecessary servers is an easy way to improve PUE and DCiE reports.
4. Reducing Total Assets to Manage – removing orphaned servers makes the remaining servers in the data center more effective. With less assets to keep track of, managers can spend time attending to the servers critical to running business applications.
5. Eliminate Hot Spots – because servers can run hot, removing them reduces “hot spots”.
6. Green Friendly – reducing the amount of hardware running in the data center helps an organization reduce its carbon footprint.
7. Gain Space – consolidating equipment frees up space in the data center.
Download our white paper “Nonproductive Servers in the Data Center” to learn more.
Michael Tresh, Director of Product Management