Networked Enterprise Featured Article

A recent case study written by Stanford University research fellow Jonathan Koomey and Jon Taylor, a partner with the Anthesis Group, found that servers in data centers are grossly underutilized. Since it costs a lot of money to purchase and operate these machines, businesses that use them are wasting money on the costs to purchase and operate them.

Koomey and Taylor cited data from a McKinsey and Company report, which found that, “utilization of servers in business and enterprise data centers ‘rarely exceeds 6 percent’”. Over 30 percent of servers are comatose, meaning that they consume electricity, but provide no useful information services. Powering off such machines would save gigawatts of power globally.

This underutilization is confirmed by other sources. One places it at seven percent; another at 12 percent. Data provided by Google (News - Alert) shows utilization of 20-40 percent, but as Gigaom guest writer Alex Benik points out, it’s likely that Google is an industry leader in this area and when utilization is at its peak, it’s because of batch processing.

If Benik is right about Google’s server utilization, that’s not a good sign. How can the average enterprise expect to improve server utilization when a company that is the exemplar of server utilization can only get to 40 percent under the best of circumstances?

One important point is that 100 percent utilization, or close to it, is not a worthy goal. Servers can experience load spikes and having extra capacity in those situations is a good thing. Virtualization was supposed to be one solution to the underutilization problem, but so far it has fallen short of meeting that goal. However, Docker container technology has been shown to improve server utilization dramatically. Unlike VMs, Docker instances share the same OS, instead of making multiple instances of them as VMs do.

ARM SoCs may also help. These chips require less power than conventional ones and would lead to better server utilization because the processor speeds would more closely match the demand put on it.

When server utilization is so low that shutting off servers would save on power consumption yet still not hamper performance, it’s time to change the way servers are designed. The most efficient users of conventional servers are still not using them to their potential. Fortunately, it appears that better utilization is attainable and can become common practice.