According to a recent study by Stanford University and Anthesis Group, about one-third of all servers operating in data centers are not needed and are therefore useless power consumers.
The study refers to these servers as "comatose" and extrapolated the global energy demand of these systems to four gigawatts.
The main causes for the occurrence of such zombie servers are the operation of unused or redundant applications, applications that continue to run only for "historical" reasons, or applications that are integrated into complex processes and that no one in the company understands anymore. For such "undead" applications, several undead servers may even be used.
"Pointless energy consumption is just a problem that arises from running zombie servers"
explains Peter Dümig, Senior Server Product Manager at Dell in Frankfurt am Main.
"In system management, these systems are of course still taken into account: They are administered, kept available, backups are made, and possibly even updates are carried out.
And if things go very badly, the zombie hardware is also regularly replaced as part of the regular procurement cycles. The bottom line is a high workload and considerable costs without any benefit.
And when we're talking about about 25 to 40 percent of all servers in a data center, we're really not talking about peanuts."
Virtual zombies
Virtualization is not the answer to the phenomenon of zombie servers, because what is not needed does not need to be virtualized; that would only shift the problem to another level.
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