Consulting company Anthesis Group found that 30 percent of physical servers are “comatose,” meaning they have not delivered information or computing services in six months or more.
The findings about server utilization are part of research conducted with Jonathan Koomey, Research Fellow at Stanford University, using data from TSO Logic.
The findings imply that there are about 10 million comatose servers worldwide – including standalone servers and host servers in virtual environments. The findings support previous research performed by the Uptime Institute, which also found that around 30 percent of servers are unused.
Removing idle servers would result in gigawatt-scale reductions in global IT load, says Koomey.
Last year the Natural Resources Defense Council worked with Anthesis on a report, “Scaling Up Energy Efficiency Across the Data Center Industry: Evaluating Key Drivers and Barriers,” which found similar results in terms of “comatose” servers.
