Server Decommissioning: Wait, We Have How Many DNS Servers?!

The Uptime Institute runs a contest each year in which data center managers compete to see who has decommissioned the most physical servers. Barclays, the multinational bank, ranked first last year by retiring 9,124 servers as part of its private cloud initiative.

What did decommissioning those servers do for Barclays?

• Reclaimed rack space equivalent to 588 server racks
• Freed up 20,000 network ports and 3,000 SAN ports
• Saved 2.5 megawatts of power over one year ($4.5 million in electricity usage)

one-fifth of racked IT equipment

Security Implications of Decommissioning Servers

ExtraHop reveals device dependencies so you can know if it's safe to decommission a server.

Trust But Verify with ExtraHop

Wait, We Have How Many DNS Servers?!

ExtraHop's auto-discovery capabilities enabled this enterprise IT organization to identify and shut down the extraneous DNS servers and then verify that the job was complete. ExtraHop automatically discovers and classifies network-connected devices based on their communications so that servers responding to DNS requests are classified as DNS servers, for example. Furthermore, ExtraHop enables IT teams to see which systems are making these requests—seeing the dependencies between systems is important because you don't want to break anything when you unplug a server.

ExtraHop automatically discovers devices that are functioning as DNS, web, and other servers based on their communications.