Up to 30 Percent of Servers Considered 'Comatose'

A recent study by Stanford University and Anthesis Group found that up to 30 percent of servers in data centers are comatose, suggesting that the servers are drawing power but aren't generating useful output. The study, reported by our sister site WindowsProIT.com, revealed that 4,000 servers were actually turned out but just sitting idle.

You have to dig around a bit to find out what “comatose” means, however, the study defines it as servers that may have been left deployed after a project ended or a business process changed but where noone is actively tracking the server’s usage. The study posits that IT managers are reluctant to decommission servers that they suspect are idle in case it turns out that it has a critical impact on an occasional process of which they were unaware.

The full article is available here: http://windowsitpro.com/windows-server/30-servers-datacenters-are-comatose.