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How to reduce the number of servers in datacenters and remote branches

Imagine a world (or a datacenter for that matter) that runs your business as securely and safely as before – but much more efficiently and with fewer servers in it.
According to IDC, server revenue across EMEA showed a second successive quarterly decline and an 11% year over year drop. So businesses are not buying servers like they used to, expecting to just make do with what they have got.
One question is what are the servers that they have got actually doing? Research from 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy shows that at least 15% of servers are not doing any useful work, or in other words, the tasks for which they were bought and provisioned. With the average annual cost of running a physical server for a year at $4400, and a virtualized one at $1000 [i], that’s a lot of money tied up in assets that are providing no business value. What’s more, servers use about 60% of their maximum power while doing nothing at all, say the analysts at Pike Research. [ii]
The other question is what would you do if you had the ability to reduce the number of branch servers you have, without compromising your business and increasing IT efficiency?
For many businesses, having to run a datacenter with fewer servers is a reality – but it isn’t as daunting as it might sound. Here are two scenarios where having fewer servers has saved our customers time, money and increased their IT efficiency:

  • In a recent project, one of our customers found that 22% of 68 servers were wasting over 80% energy. The company now stands to make double the energy savings – with every watt of energy saved, another watt in cooling is saved concurrently. By introducing datacentre infrastructure management (DCIM) efficiency tools into your datacenter you could switch off as many as one in six of your servers, which is an attractive proposition when you can’t buy more.
  • At one customer site, 1E was able to reduce the number of branch servers by 98% – from 6,000 distribution points to just 200 (that’s a 30-fold ROI in CAPEX and OPEX). Another compelling reason to start thinking about – and not be afraid of – operating with fewer servers.

To find out more about how you could transform your organization and operate with fewer servers, please visit:

  • Our Nomad Enterprise page, which shows you how you can remove the need for branch servers or desk side visits – reducing your existing server footprint and administrative overhead.
  • Our NightWatchman Server Edition page, which measures how much power is being used by your servers and identifies which are being inefficient, suggesting good candidates for re-purposing, power management or decommissioning.

[i] “Server energy and efficiency report”, 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy, 2009.
[ii] “PC and Server Power Management Software”, Pike Research, 2011.

Report

The FORRESTER WAVE™: End-User Experience Management, Q3 2022

The FORRESTER WAVE™: End-User Experience Management, Q3 2022