Significantly larger number of processes on some servers running same things

Issue

• One of our application teams has noticed an odd situation with some of their RHEL 6.2 systems. They have DEV and TEST environments that should be basically equivalent, running the same items. However, for no apparent reason the TST systems in this block have many more processes running.
• At first I thought it was just customer-application based, but I see it's even for system processes. Here's an example:

[root@x52dev30 ~]# ps -ef | grep -c ext4-dio-unwrit
10

[root@x52tst30 ~]# ps -ef | grep -c ext4-dio-unwrit
73