Pulling the Plug on Comatose Servers

Just as office tenants pay for square footage based on how many workers they expect to employ, the $200 billion data center industry charges customers based on how much space their servers occupy and how much power they plan to use. Data center customers, however, tend to overestimate, asking and paying for more servers than they need. They then wind up with so-called comatose servers that may sit idle for months. Some 30 percent of the world’s servers are going unused at any given moment, wasting about $30 billion a year, according to a June estimate by Stanford and Anthesis Consulting Group.

By contrast, the public clouds of Amazon.com and Google give customers the flexibility to pay as they go, rather than committing to a certain use of processing power upfront. A new $300 million, 100,000-square-foot data center in Plano, Texas, is the first to take a cue from the public clouds by similarly letting tenants pay for computing power based on actual use. The center’s owner, Aligned Energy, says it should be able to save customers 30 percent to 50 percent a year in data center costs.