Only Here in IT

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We talk about these idle servers—computers that run nothing except an operating system. They have been abandoned, forgotten, left out in the cold (somewhere in the data center) to—well, not to rot I suppose, since they still hum along, taking up space, using electricity and generating heat. But, left to their own devices, I guess.

A server can linger in this state for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes we think we’ll keep it as a backup—just for a few weeks—after migrating its applications to new equipment. Sometimes we think we might need to use it again. Maybe it could come in handy for application overflow at some point. In the end, though, we are talking about servers that no longer serve any purpose to the organization. They just waste money, both to power them and to cool them

What’s funny are the names we call them. Sometimes they are under-utilized servers. (Isn’t that PC?) Sometime’s they’re orphans. Sometimes they’re zombies.

Zombies and orphans. It struck me that the only place where you could use the words “orphan” and “zombie” interchangeably is in our IT world.