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1 In 3 Data Center Servers Is a Zombie

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-like-my-neighborhood dept.

dcblogs writes with these snippets from a ComputerWorld story about a study that says nearly a third of all data-center servers are are comatose ("using energy but delivering no useful information"). What's remarkable is this percentage hasn't changed since 2008, when a separate study showed the same thing. ... A server is considered comatose if it hasn't done anything for at least six months. The high number of such servers "is a massive indictment of how data centers are managed and operated," said Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University, who has done data center energy research for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "It's not a technical issue as much as a management issue."

7 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Money by 14erCleaner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not a management issue, either - it's money. People cost more than dead servers.

    --
    Have you read my blog lately?
    1. Re:Money by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Money (or lack of it) IS a management issue....

      But how hard is it to automate a process that says, in effect, "if no data is going in or out of this server, shut it down"? I suspect that there is a more nefarious purpose here and I propose a corollary to Hanlon's (Heinlein's) Razor:

      This is the 21st Century - "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from villainy". Incompetence is for the proletariat - we're the NSA. You're toast.

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      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:Money by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But how hard is it to automate a process that says, in effect, "if no data is going in or out of this server, shut it down"?

      Why should the data center even care.

      Most of them are essentially charging rent ... as long as the customer keeps paying, WTF do they care if you actually use them for anything?

      This isn't incompetence on behalf of the data centers. Maybe companies who have machines they've lost track of what they're for.

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      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. Sounds about right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One in three people consumes energy and produces nothing interesting.

  3. Obviously by penguinoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those are the servers hosting Slashdot's new "share" button. No one's ever clicked on it.

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    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
  4. They are not consuming 30% of power by iamacat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Modern systems are good at reducing power consumption when idle. It's quite reasonable to have 30% of capacity as spares, reserve for unexpected load, capacity for new apps and so on. They probably consume 3% of the power and nobody is motivated enough to look for more savings. Keeping things completely off is problematic, because you never know how much of the hardware and software will come up in time to handle an emergency unless you run and test it all the time.

    There is certainly room for further environmental/financial improvement, but the 30% figure is sensationalized.

  5. Bad terminology by pubwvj · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unfortunate confuse of terminology. Zombie computers is a term also used to mean those taken over by bot nets.