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Data centers use a lot of power, and while the move to renewable energy helps, other efficiencies must be created to keep these power-hungry behemoths in check. It is estimated that 2% of the carbon emissions in the world come from data centers, and that will only increase as we stream more, save more on the cloud, and demand internet that is faster and faster. However, there is a monster or monsters lurking in nearly every data center - zombie servers.

Even as demand for larger, faster data centers increases, there is a significant push for those data centers to be more efficient. So many data centers use less power as they expand. This is in part due to Power Useage Effectiveness (PUE) standards that determine how well a data center uses the power available to them.

Zombie servers are servers that still use power but don’t actually do any work. These energy wasters can be difficult to find, especially in large data centers with thousands of servers. Part of the problem is that unlike powering off your laptop, a server is always using energy even when it is “idle.” It’s never truly off. Since the idea is to get equipment to use less energy by doing more work, it is vital that these servers be identified.

The reason quite simply is power usage. Since the server is never truly idle, it is hard to find, because all the servers in a stack may appear to be pulling equal amounts of power, but it can be hard to determine which ones are doing the most work. While A.I. monitoring helps, it is still not a foolproof solution.

Not to mention the fact that many data centers have not yet implemented that technology. Traditional Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software can help with power usage and cooling, but in order to achieve newer and stricter efficiency standards, data centers must take additional steps we will talk about in a moment.

In fact, as recently as 2015, a study found that 1 in 3 servers in data centers were “zombies”, either comatose or consuming energy and doing little to no work. Immediately, many data centers began to take steps to locate, isolate, and remove these zombie servers. “It’s a matter of technical efficiency,” Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University told Computer World.

Read the full blog post to learn more about how to deal with zombie servers, including:

• Wake Me Up or Just Go-Go
• Zombie Hunting