The Raritan Blog

What to do with your Zombie and Ghost Servers?

Paula Alves
March 4, 2015

You know those servers that you have out in your data center, powered up but doing nothing? What do you do with them?   While you can simply just let them continue running in your data center, they can actually cost you more than you think.  Consider that a typical five year old server, that is not ENERGY STAR® compliant could consume 175 watts at idle. If 10% of the servers in a 1000 server data center are ghost servers, and electricity costs $0.15/kwh, it equates to roughly $23,000 of un-necessary expense not including your cooling expenses. So what do you do?  Do you take the risk and power them down, decommission them, and deal with potential screaming and risk of loss of operations later? Probably not.