Attack of the zombie servers!

Image:  Critical data centre at University of Hertford. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Unported 3.0 license.

The Wall Street Journal today has an article by Bob McMillan highlighting my work with Anthesis and TSO Logic on zombie servers (those that are using electricity but delivering no useful computing services).  To download our most recent report on the topic, go here.

Here are the first few paragraphs:

There are zombies lurking in data centers around the world.

They’re servers—millions of them, by one estimate—sucking up lots of power while doing nothing. It is a lurking environmental problem that doesn’t get much discussion outside of the close-knit community of data-center operators and server-room geeks.

The problem is openly acknowledged by many who have spent time in a data center: Most companies are far better at getting servers up and running than they are at figuring out when to pull the plug, says Paul Nally, principal of his own consulting company, Bruscar Technologies LLC, and a data-center operations executive with experience in the financial-services industry. “Things that should be turned off over time are not,” he says. “And unfortunately the longer they linger there, the worse the problem becomes.”

Mr. Nally once audited a data center that had more than 1,000 servers that were powered on but not identifiable on the network. They hadn’t even been configured with domain-name-system software—the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone number. “They would have never been found by any other methodology other than walking around with a clipboard,” Mr. Nally says.

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I’m hopeful that increased attention to this issue will result in more management focus and better application of computing resources to solve business problems.  That’s one reason why I’m teaching my upcoming online class (October 5 to November 13, 2015) titled Modernizing enterprise data centers for fun and profit.  Also see my recent article in DCD Focus with the same title.