New research finds that 25% of all physical servers -- and 30% of all virtual servers -- are comatose. These are systems that have no activity in the last six months.
The problem with comatose, or zombie, physical servers is well known. Past studies have routinely put the number of undead enterprise physical servers in the 20% to 30% range. But this latest research looked at virtual servers as well, and they may represent a significant cost to IT departments.
That's because users may be paying licensing fees on their virtual servers, as well as on the software they support, said the researchers.
Comatose servers, both virtual and physical, may also represent "an unappreciated security risk" because they aren't patched and maintained, according to the research paper by Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University, and Jon Taylor, a partner at the Athensis Group, a consulting firm.
The Zombie Apocalypse may not take the form you've been expecting...
(Score: 5, Informative) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @12:39PM (2 children)
The penultimate paragraph mentions "users who keep servers sitting for months because they are used for backup." An article titled "A third of virtual servers are hot backups" wouldn't get as many clicks.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 13 2017, @01:54PM (1 child)
Setup and shutdown costs and time.. may also be a factor. Just paying the bills may be more efficient.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Saturday May 13 2017, @02:45PM
Yes, exactly. I was trying to say that the story is click-bait.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Weasley on Saturday May 13 2017, @10:06PM
Zombie is a word used to mean a hijacked computer used in a botnet. That headline is a bit deceptive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13 2017, @11:42PM
My favorite personal anecdote about this topic is this one teamspeak server, that 6+ years ago had like 30-50 users on it, all of the time. Someone gave me access to it for some random reason, and i forgot all about it.
Long story short, i now use that server as my personal teamspeak, heh. It's been 2 years now, and i haven't seen anyone else using it.
Or the time i uploaded my gothy/industrial mp3 collection to these random chinese university servers, to long-term preserve it, about 70 gb. Eight years later, i was able to retrieve one full copy of the file, ehehe. It's probably still there.
"an unappreciated security risk" nope.
More of "an appreciated security risk, don't ever change".