Server Decommissioning Workshop
Underutilized and comatose servers typically account for 20-30% of a company’s server install base. Systematically, reliably, and repetitively eliminating these servers can drastically improve your overall IT efficiency by freeing up valuable IT resources that can now be put to better use, and restore corporate resources to the bottom line or development.
-Paul Nally, Director at Barclays
A server utilization monitoring and server decommissioning effort must be undertaken in a purposeful and thorough fashion. The effort typically involves a variety of stakeholders positioned in various groups throughout the enterprise. The opportunity for business disruption is real, yet the results can be in the millions of dollars of reduced cost and recovered data center capacity.
Uptime Institute facilitates workshops to ensure justification, coordination, and success of a comatose server decommissioning effort. In this workshop, Uptime Institute consulting services will evaluate your current asset lifecycle processes and procedures, and facilitate mapping out and defining a new and improved server decommissioning process that utilizes tried and true best practices, proven through client case studies to reduce server waste in their computer rooms. We will also provide you with tips on the best ways to identify underutilized servers, the importance of having the right tools in place to manage and track your hardware assets, as well as how to make the business case to get that vital management buy-in to the process.
Workshop Topics & Sequence:
- Make the business case
- Identify present processes and ownership for server life cycle management
- Evaluate installed tools for monitor server utilization
- Identify the servers to target
- Map out process and define responsibility
- How to evergreen the comatose server decommissioning process
Uptime Institute will facilitate the 1- to 2-day on-site workshop and provide a memo of findings and recommendations appropriate to the workshop proceedings and prudent next steps.
It has been said that the greenest data center is the one that’s 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
Decommissioning as a Discipline
- AOL discusses IT Efficiency and Server Decommissioning
- Visa and AOL - 2015 Server Roundup competition winners
- Past Server Roundup Winners Share Success
- In 2013, Barclays removed 9,124 physical servers from its data centers globally
