The IT consulting firm Anthesis Group, in partnership with Stanford University and TSO Logic, has issued a report that suggests there may be as many as 10 million physical servers, or 30% of the servers deployed worldwide, that are not doing any work.

The report refers to these idle servers as “comatose.” These particular servers have not delivered information or computing services in the last six months.

The number is taken from a 2012 IDC survey that found 35 million physical servers deployed worldwide. The study found 30% were idle, which translated to approximately 10 million.

The problem isn’t technological, it’s a general lack of management oversight in the data center, according to a report by Jonathan Koomey, research fellow at Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and Jon Taylor, a partner at Anthesis Group, who co-authored the report.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here