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April 27, 2015 — For the fourth year running, Uptime Institute has highlighted the massive energy and cost savings that companies can achieve by focusing on IT efficiency. Uptime Institute estimates that up to 30 percent of servers in IT departments around the world are actually “comatose” – abandoned by application owners and users but still racked and running, wasting energy and placing ongoing demands on data center facility power and capacity.
Identifying and decommissioning unused equipment requires some effort and organizational commitment, but the rewards are great: millions of dollars saved, thousands of kW hours in reduced energy consumption, lower software licensing and maintenance fees, and a smaller carbon footprint.
For the last four years, Uptime Institute has challenged companies around the globe to help address and solve the problem of comatose servers by participating in the Server Roundup, a Wild West-themed contest to spur IT teams into action.
Server Roundup recognizes the hard work of the participating companies, and illustrates how IT teams can drive out unnecessary costs by taking immediate action on this problem.
“The Server Roundup honorees are leading their peers in the industry on the issue of reducing data center resource consumption, and their lessons learned are highly transferable to the industry at large,” said Matt Stansberry, Director of Content and Publications at Uptime Institute.
The companies are being honored this week at the Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif.
Global financial giant Visa decommissioned 9,094 devices in 2014, reduced power consumption by 557 kW, and reclaimed 3,000 square feet of data center space. The company expects to save over $3.2 million annually.
“We continue to focus on driving efficiency in our data centers. Continuous technology refresh and having an equally aggressive focus on decommission is key for our vision of efficient data centers,” said Swamy Kocherlakota, head of Global Infrastructure at Visa.
AOL – an organization that has participated in the Uptime Institute Server Roundup since its inception in 2011 – has continued to reduce its under-used server footprint again in 2014.
With a base of 33,103 servers in production as of Jan. 1, 2014, AOL decommissioned and physically removed 14,805 servers over the course of 2014. The quantity of decommissions represented a 45 percent turnover rate.
The decommissioning of the servers in three data centers resulted in a reduction of 36,737 metric tons of carbon emissions and a total cost savings of just over $4.3 million. AOL disposes of assets through a variety of third-party vendors who refurbish them for resale, donate them if appropriate, or recycle via scrap metal brokers after data sanitization. The disposal of old servers during 2014 resulted in a profit of $6 million.
"AOL's mission is to unleash the world's best builders of culture and code, and to do so we need to be the most agile, efficient, and forward-looking company in the media technology industry," said William Pence, AOL Global CTO. "I am proud of the work we have done in decommissioning legacy infrastructure, implementing a colocation strategy, and doubling down in cloud technology, which has allowed us to bring mobile-first, video-led consumer products and groundbreaking advertising solutions to market."
Uptime Institute’s Comatose Server Savings Calculator lets you input data specific to your environment to get a quick approximation of the results you can expect by decommissioning your comatose servers.
