Summary
This piece quotes Jonathan Koomey, research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, on his calculation that the United States has more than 3.6 million comatose servers. Keeping them powered up requires the services of an estimated 1.44 gigawatts of generating capacity, equivalent to three big power plants.
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.
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Lately, the data-center industry has been getting a clearer picture of how widespread the zombie-server problem is. Earlier this year, Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University, looked at 4,000 servers used by clients of a data-center-efficiency company called TSO Logic Inc. He found that 30% of them hadn’t been used over the previous six months.
By Mr. Koomey’s calculation, there are more than 3.6 million comatose servers in the U.S. Keeping them powered up requires the services of an estimated 1.44 gigawatts of generating capacity—equivalent to three big power plants.
Even though Mr. Koomey’s data backed up what the industry had suspected for years, he still considers the results “appalling.”
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