Server Room Management: Is Power-Down Necessary?

When it comes to server room management, deciding to power-down excess server capacity may help save on energy costs -- but virtualization and cloud computing give even less of a reason to do so. In this ZDNet Asia report, one Gartner analyst notes that when it comes to a more dynamic infrastructure where companies have the ability to turn servers on or off, there is often added complexity in operation and management.

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Virtualization and cloud computing give enterprises less of a reason to power down servers.

"As such, enterprises may consider powering down servers running apps that are not virtualized or are unlikely targets for virtualization, either overnight or over the weekend, particularly if they do not expect high application usage during those shutdown periods, he said.

"Rasit, however, warned that with those sorts of plans, there is an element of risk. That's what the conservative end-user organizations argue--if [the server is] up and running, then it's available. If …you power the server off, then obviously if an application request came through, you'd have to power the server up and make sure the application was running correctly, and so response time is slower'.

"When a server is powered on and off 'multiple times throughout the day or over the course of a month or year, there's going to be additional strain that you're adding to the server, which could lead to early failure of hardware components', he pointed out."

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