WP#74 - Solving the Costly Zombie Server Problem

Overview

This document is The Green Grid's white paper number 74, dated 1 August 2017. It offers guidance on finding and removing zombie servers, meaning servers that are powered on but do little or no productive work. The term covers both physical and virtual servers. The Green Grid is an industry consortium working on data centre energy efficiency. The topic bears directly on operating cost, since it means power and cooling capacity is spent on equipment doing no productive work.

The guidance covers cost elements, stakeholders, tools, a detection plan and an asset-management programme to prevent recurrence. According to its abstract, the paper draws on Uptime Institute server roundups and later case studies. Its approach proposes a process built on continuous management of compute assets rather than a one-off clean-up. In this respect the paper describes an operating programme more than a one-time clean-up guide.

Access to the paper requires a registration form, and only the publication date and abstract from The Green Grid library page were used here; the full text was not read. The detection methods and cost figures are therefore not detailed here. Readers should consult the original document for those details. Readers should consult the original text, reached via the registration form, for details.

Key points

1. The paper is dated 1 August 2017.
2. Zombies include physical and virtual servers with little or no productive activity.
3. The guidance covers cost elements, stakeholders and tools.
4. It provides a detection plan and a compute-asset management approach.
5. It draws on Uptime Institute server roundups and later case studies.

Using it in design

• In IT load planning, allow an unused-server fraction.
• Show the energy and capex recovered by decommissioning unused servers.
• Add the detection and asset-management process to the operations plan to prevent recurrence.

Who should read it

Operations and energy managers who plan IT load and manage server inventory.

Publication details

Authors

Nicola Peill-Moelter; John Frey; Bob Landstrom; Kevin Hogan; Peter Jestico; Corban Lester

Publisher

The Green Grid

Year

2017

Document number

WP 74

Document language

English

Source type

Industry body

Access

Citation only

Licence

Copyright retained; citation only — the publisher’s terms apply to the original document

Citation