With data center energy consumption surging and power costs through the roof, it’s no wonder companies are putting electrical efficiency at the top of their wish lists. But a survey by Forrester of 185 IT professionals in the US, UK and Australia contained a curious finding: Few companies considered underutilized servers to be a culprit.
“Despite the concern over electrically inefficient IT gear, just eight percent of our respondents linked low server utilization to data center costs,” according to the survey findings. “However, it seems that poor utilization is at least partly to blame, with nearly half of companies saying that prior to IT consolidation, server utilization levels were 0 percent to 30 percent — and many just didn’t know.”
“Like their server environments, about half of the companies surveyed for this report estimated storage utilization at 0 percent to 30 percent,” the Forrester report continued. “Direct attached storage was slightly worse, since it lacks the ability to be shared between systems — but no type of storage was immune.”
Forrester analysts were quick to point out that while companies saw their IT equipment as “a significant source of electrical waste,” they focused more on efficiency of the specific equipment instead its underutilization.