Last fall, 100 server administrators at some of the world's largest companies were surveyed about their physical and virtual servers. 
Nearly three-quarters of them indicated that 15 percent of their physical servers are running but not being used. "If you were to pull the plug on those servers, nobody in the business would be impacted by those servers being down," said Andy Dominey, 1E product manager. 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) commissioned an independent research firm to conduct this survey.
Unused physical servers can lead to not only wasted energy costs but also wasted operational costs. "The operational licensing and hardware costs to keep a server up and running is fairly significant," said Dominey. "The total running cost of 2,000 servers is almost $8 million. The vast majority of that—about $6.5 million—is equated to just the operational costs alone."
Running unused servers isn't a problem limited to physical servers. In all, 65 percent of the server administrators admitted that, at some point, they virtualized a server that wasn't even needed in the first place. Even more common is virtual sprawl—that is, the uncontrolled deployment of virtual machines (VMs). In all, 84 percent of the server administrators said they are experiencing or are concerned about virtual server sprawl. Virtual sprawl can result from various actions. For example, too many VMs might have been created or the purpose for which a VM was created no longer exists.
These survey findings as well as others are published in the 1E/ASE report titled "Server Energy and Efficiency Report 2009". ASE is a nonprofit coalition that promotes the efficient and clean use of energy worldwide. It was founded in 1977 by two U.S. senators who were concerned that Americans were beginning to return to energy-wasteful lifestyles after the energy crisis created by the Arab oil embargo. Founded in 1997, 1E offers products and services aimed to make IT more efficient. It's probably best known for its NightWatchman power-management solution for desktops.
1E recently released the newest version of a product that bears a similar name: NightWatchman Server Edition. Like the NightWatchman desktop solution, NightWatchman Server Edition can help reduce power consumption, but it does so in an entirely different way.
"When we looked at servers originally," explained Dominey, "we looked at it as a server power-management solution. We were originally thinking about turning off servers. We were met very quickly with concerns from our customers." In a nutshell, the customers basically said that switching off production servers is very, very bad.
"The power management we do today with Server Edition doesn't, at any point, bring the server down. The server is always up and always responsive," explained Dominey. "But by using our Drowsy Server capabilities, we're able to reduce the power consumption of a typical server by about 12 to 15 percent."