Uptime Institute estimates that up to 30 percent of the nation's 12 million servers are actually “comatose” – abandoned by application owners and users but still racked and running, wasting energy and placing ongoing demands on data center facility power and capacity.
"The data shows that average server utilization is alarmingly low in most data centers, meaning that organizations are throwing money at comatose and under-used servers," writes the organization.
In this highlight video from Uptime Institute Symposium 2012, the company's founder Ken Brill and Stanford professor Dr. Jon Koomey discussed the importance of powering down under-utilized servers when it comes to data center efficiency.
Now available via free download upon completion of a short form, Uptime's Comatose Server Savings Calculator white paper lets facilities operators input data specific to their data center environment to get a quick approximation of results that can be expected by decommissioning comatose servers.
Consolidating and decommissioning unused equipment requires effort and organizational commitment, notes Uptime, but as may be gleaned from the white paper's calculations, the potential rewards can be significant.
Download Uptime Institute's 'Comatose Server Savings Calculator'