Uptime Institute Efficient IT:

Server Decommissioning Workshops

Taking action to improve server utilization delivers immediate and

significant cost and resource savings
Comatose IT equipment is hiding in plain sight within even the most sophisticated IT organizations.
The servers, abandoned by application owners and users but still racked and running, represent a triple
threat in terms of energy wastesquandering power at the plug, wasting data center facility capacity,
and incurring software licensing and hardware maintenance costs. They may be costing your organization
millions of dollars annually.

Decommissioning comatose servers, improving the
utilization of your remaining servers, and managing
server refresh rates can vastly improve the efficiency
of your data center, while saving energy, reducing
carbon emissions, and lowering operating costs. In
fact, the biggest driver of operational cost savings is
reducing IT hardware count.
Its not hard to see how the savings add up, given that
underutilized and comatose servers typically account
for 20-30% of a companys server install base. Not
only do those servers draw power, but they also place
demands on facility infrastructure and cooling systems,
and contribute to personnel costs. Systematically and
repetitively eliminating these servers can drastically
improve your overall IT efficiency by freeing up
valuable resources that can then be put to better use.
Yet many organizations resist taking action. Despite
the preponderance of industry evidence, they think
that comatose servers arent a problem in their
data centereven though theyve never done a
server audit to determine if thats the case. Too
often, IT and Facilities teams are operating in silos
with organizational structures that dont facilitate
collaboration, creating a disconnect between
equipment and the computing activity it supports.
Some organizations may even perceive that the effort
and cost of launching a decommissioning program is
too much, or its just not a priority. In reality, however,
the time and money spent on server efficiency will
be rapidly returned to the company. Uptime Institute
experts can help your organization create and execute
a server strategy that will deliver significant cost
savings and efficiency benefits.
It has been said that the greenest data center
is the one thats never built.
That is the main reason we have our server
decommissioning program at Barclays. We are
looking to shrink our data center footprint and
benefit from the savings that this affords us,
while allowing ourselves to massively expand
our overall compute capability. When obsolete
servers are removed in the thousands, it creates
the capacity that we need to bring the next
generation of systems in. We save in space;
we save in power. It helps us meet our carbon
targets. When we eliminate or virtualize a server,
we also save on network, SAN, and software
costs. We end up in a cleaner, safer, cheaper
place with the capacity in hand that we need to
continue to grow our business. There is real work,
and some risk, in getting this job done, but the
benefits are simply too many to ignore.

-Paul Nally, Director at Barclays

Long-Lasting Benefits Workshop Topics & Sequence:
The expense of launching a decommissioning project
Make the business case
and implementing new server utilization strategies will
be quickly dwarfed by the cost reductions you achieve, Identify present processes and ownership for

both immediately and ongoing. Dollars saved can be server life cycle management

restored to the corporate bottom line or applied toward
new business initiatives and investments. Energy use
can be reduced, benefitting your budgetand the
planetwith reduced carbon emissions.
Evaluate installed monitoring tools
Identify the servers to target
Map out processes and define responsibilities

The OpEx savings from efficient server management Evergreen the server decommissioning process

are significant; so are the capital expenditures you
can avoid. Housing comatose and underutilized
servers drives your facility to capacity much sooner.
Decommissioning servers and increasing utilization
frees up white space and extends the life of an
existing facility, increasing the return on your original
data center investment.
Uptime Institute will facilitate a 1- to 2-day on-
site workshop, provide a memo of findings and
recommendations appropriate to the workshop
proceedings, and outline prudent next steps.
Ready to Get Started?
Take advantage of our multi-million dollar, decades-

From decommissioning efforts alone, leading data long investment in Efficient IT research, innovation,

center organizations have lowered their energy bills education, and evangelization. Put impactful efficiency

by millions of dollars; lowered carbon emissions by practices to work in your data center.

multiple metric tons; and freed up hundreds of server

racks, thousands of network ports and hundreds Questions?
of SAN ports; while dramatically reducing their Please contact your regional representative online:

software license and hardware maintenance costs. http://uptimeinstitute.com/contact-us,

Uptime Institute Server Decommissioning Workshops email us at: info@uptimeinstitute.com,

will put your organization on the path towards results or by phone at: +1 206.706.4149

like these.

How to Ensure Decommissioning Success

A server utilization monitoring and decommissioning
effort must be undertaken in a purposeful and
thorough fashion, and typically involves a variety of
stakeholders positioned in groups throughout the
enterprise. The potential business disruption is real,
yet the results can be millions of dollars of reduced
cost plus recovered data center capacity.

Uptime Institute Workshops help you navigate the

justification and coordination process, and ensure the
success of a comatose server decommissioning effort.
Our consultants evaluate your current asset lifecycle
processes and procedures, and facilitate mapping out
and defining a new and improved server management
process. Implementation plans apply methods that
have been proven to reduce server waste. We also
provide tips on the best ways to identify underutilized
servers, and show how to make the business case to
get vital management buy-in to the process. A holistic Uptime Institute is a division of The 451 Group, a leading technology

server efficiency plan can also employ virtualization
and adjustments to server refresh rates to further
increase efficiency.
industry analyst and data company. Uptime Institute has office locations
in the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, U.K., Spain, U.A.E., Russia,
Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Visit www.uptimeinstitute.com for more information.

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