VIRTUAL BENEFITS

We call them “electric heaters”: servers that are indispensable for daily operations but never show a system load of more than 10 percent. They could be DHCP, DNS, print, file and fax servers, and the occasional, venerable application server that only three people need – but you don’t dare switch them off. Add the inevitable test systems that nobody dares touch. The hardware is typically outdated, but why would you want to buy something newer if the old machines are not working at anything like full capacity? At the same time, these machines give you that sinking feeling: one thing is for sure, old hardware is bound to crash some time. Just imagine the chaos if the DHCP server goes down on a Monday morning; this is when the load of just a few percent would really start to tell.