New tool will help company make savings from underutilised servers

The company is working with PC power management specialist, 1E, to deploy its new NightWatchman Server Edition – launched at the end of last week to target the £15 billion of IT spend wasted each year on servers that are underutilised and provide no business value.

NightWatchman Server Edition provides detailed reporting on the useful work a server is performing, the energy it is consuming and whether there is any waste – making it easier for managers to make confident decisions on things such as server decommissioning, consolidation, virtualisation and power management.

In addition, 1E’s Drowsy Server technology monitors activity and minimises energy consumption when no useful work is being done. A server in a ‘drowsy’ state cuts energy costs by an average 12 per cent without affecting the server’s availability, the company claims. 

Dr Paul Toyne, head of sustainability at Bovis Lend Lease confirmed that his company would be working with 1E to deploy its solution across its servers.

“Sustainability is a guiding principle at Bovis Lend Lease. We are always looking for innovations like 1E’s NightWatchman Server Edition that could bring our carbon base load to a lower level,” he said.

The potential business value of deploying such a solution is confirmed in the findings of new research commissioned by 1E in association with the Alliance to Save Energy. 

The ‘2009 Server Energy & Efficiency Report’ by Kelton Research questioned 100 IT professionals in global companies with at least 10,000 employees and found 15 per cent of servers are not doing anything useful (according to 72 per cent of server managers).

In other words, these servers are being run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, being managed and upgraded without being used on a daily basis. IE extrapolates this finding to conclude that, with 44 million servers in the world, 4.7 million servers are needlessly costing IT departments more than $4,000 (£2,400) a year in operational costs.

The Kelton Research findings suggest that this is largely an unseen problem, with 83 per cent of IT managers admitting that they don’t have an adequate grasp of server utilisation and 63 per cent saying they rely on manual checks, trial and error or wait until something is broken to find unused servers.

“Contrary to popular belief, one of the largest causes of energy and IT operational waste in data centres are servers that are simply not being used,” said 1E’s ceo, Sumir Karayi. 

“The savings from decommissioning non-productive servers cannot be ignored. Organisations need better information on server efficiency and more effective ongoing server energy management.”

1E’s NightWatchman Server Edition will sit alongside the company’s well-established Nightwatchman product which is deployed on four million PCs worldwide and which, the company claims, has saved organisations more than $360 million (£220 million) in energy costs and reduced CO2 emissions by 2.7 million tonnes in the nine years since its launch.