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1 In 3 Data Center Servers Is a Zombie
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."
It's not a management issue, either - it's money. People cost more than dead servers.
Have you read my blog lately?
A fail over server is not considered useless. They did not monitor server output and decided then after a period of time that the server were not doing anything. You can infer this knowledge by reading the "paper", as they switched these servers off after identifying them. Switching of fail over servers normally would raise alarms and then you get thrown out ;-) So you could safely assume that they mean unused servers.
Reading the title, my first thought was, cripes, those botnets have taken over everything!
Those are the servers hosting Slashdot's new "share" button. No one's ever clicked on it.
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In a modern data center you would be able to shutdown the servers not used for a longer period and restart them automatically when the load rises.
Many businesses that rely on servers (i.e. all of them) will be running hot standby systems - ones that can automatically take load if there's a hardware failure or software problem.
One major (world-ranked) international company I consulted at was legally required to have 100% failover capacity - so it was inevitable that they would automatically have 50% of their production servers performing no functions - except for the twice a year when they were "flipped" just to make sure that each set of servers worked as expected.
Although the source paper does specify physical "zombie" servers, if you need failover VMs, the same basis is applied there, too.
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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.
I've been in IT Management for 15+ and I can assure you it is a good thing you are not in management. I would lose my job in a heartbeat if production server decided to take a dump and I had shut off all our fail-over servers.
It's not just a matter of what those fail-over servers costs. It's the question "Can we afford (financially) to NOT have fail-over servers?". If you stand to lose more due to a production server failure than the cost of running a fail-over for a year then you will not EVER wish to be caught without one.
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Unfortunate confuse of terminology. Zombie computers is a term also used to mean those taken over by bot nets.
yes, but these researchers were ignoring traffic below a certain threshold.