Killing Zombie Servers Pays Big Bucks
Posted on Tue, Sep 07, 2010 @ 12:03 PM
We are always yapping about the number of underutilized servers in a data center. And I’m about to do it again now. Anywhere from 10-to-30 percent of the servers in most data centers do nothing but run an operating system, and perhaps maybe a backup agent. (Hey, you have to make sure those idle servers are well protected.)
I was at a customer site recently. Our client has a 10-year-old data center—not too big, about 1,200 servers. They did the whole orphan removal thing, and found a little over 400 running servers doing all of zip for the business. So they turned them all off. (A bold move. Most customers opt to do some kind of consolidation, P-to-V plan as a first step). That’s over a third of their servers. A third. Wow.
The guy who ran the project wound up doing a little more math. He figured out that, with 400 orphan servers over ten years, his organization averaged about 40 servers a year going zombie. They were more than just useless. They cost his business anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars a year to power and cool. He calculated that the zombies amounted about 45 grand a year for him. Data center management was all aflutter because the data center cut something like $400k off their annual power bill with the shutdown. The thing is though, when he compounded it yearly for ten years, he figured out that the total wasted cash to-date was more like $1.8 million.
I think I need to start taking a cut.
-- Michael Rowan, Co-founder and CTO, Viridity Software