Sustainable IT | Ted Samson | InfoWorld | When PCs don't snooze, you lose | June 14, 2007 03:00 AM

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When PCs don't snooze, you lose

June 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

When PCs don't snooze, you lose

Companies are waking up to the fact that powering down systems after hours can reap significant cost and energy savings

One of the more frustrating aspects of launching a new technology project at an organization, such as a new document management system or upgraded CRM software, is that the return on investment can be downright difficult to measure in clear, obvious monetary figures.

Therein lies the advantage of certain green projects: Beyond the environmental benefits, the ROI can be so immediate and evident, your CFO might just slap his or her forehead for not doing it sooner.

PC and monitor power management falls under that easy-to-measure, cost-saving, carbon-reducing, CFO-self-masochism-inducing category. The bottom line is, lots of organizations leave their PCs and monitors humming nights and weekends when no one is around to use them. Powering down those systems can result in as much as $45 in energy savings per PC and $30 per monitor, per year, according to Energy Star.

Just chew on that for a moment. That's $75 a year, times the number of PCs and monitors at your organization. Or you can take the more conservative figure of $25. Whatever the case, a company with 5,000 systems is looking at adding around $125,000 to the happy side of the accounting ledger at the end of the year, and for very minimal effort on IT's part.

Environmentally speaking, a machine left on all the time results in an extra half-ton of CO2 emissions per year, according to California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Thus, the ecobenefits are evident as well.

Ripe for the plucking
"What we're solving here is really low-hanging fruit with results that are significantly larger than all the datacenter work that's going on out there," says Sumir Karayi, the CEO at 1E, which is among a host of vendors offering tools aimed at helping network admins get a handle on desktop waste. "The simple reasons for that is just numbers: the number of PCs there are compared to servers. It's at least a 10-to-1 ratio in the corporate space. If you start switching off a percentage of them, even just 30 percent, then the sort of savings you'll see are massive."

1E's Patch Management Pack includes NightWatchman, which admins can use to tailor policies for automatically powering down systems across the network when they're not in use.

Also part of 1E's package is SMSWakeUp, which includes WOL (Wake-On-LAN) technology to rouse systems from slumber when they need to be patched. Admins also can set systems to boot at specific times, meaning end-users will be able to sit down at their desks and start working when they arrive. Moreover, 1E's system is designed to save users' work before shutting down their systems, as well not to shut down if a system is running predetermined applications.

Among 1E's customers is Vision Service Plan (VSP), a supplier of eye care benefits in the United States with more than 2,300 PCs. According to 1E, VSP is using the Patch Management Pack to power down 85 percent of its workstations at night, reaping anticipated savings of $63 per PC per year. That's around $145,000 per annum -- plus the company also derives benefit of far more successful patch jobs.

User needs may vary
Common among these power management solutions are configurable policies, which admins can tailor for particular groups, or even individuals, to reflect their respective hours and needs. Policies also might be adjusted to ensure that a system won't take a snooze if specific processes are running in the background.

Implementing power management without disrupting users is key, which is, in part, where the flexible policies come in handy. Karayi and Bruce Twito, CTO and vice president of product development at Verdiem, both suggest that admins not get too rigid with policies, so as not to overly irritate users. For example, overly ambitious policies might result in the monitor or system powering down every 10 minutes while a user is trying to read an article or when a stats application is running a complex process.

"If people are very IT savvy, they're going to object to not letting them use their machines as fast as they want to," says Karayi. "You can still save a massive amount of power. There's around 9.5 hours in a workday. You still have the 14 hours to play with where machine can be off."

On the other hand, you might want to create stricter policies for the systems that rarely see use, notes Rob Meinhardt, CEO of KACE, which offers KBOX, essentially a plug-and-play appliance which offers, among other features, power management, configuration management and WOL capabilities. "At any given office, you could have literally hundred, thousands of machines in the building. And inevitably, there are machines on the periphery of use that aren't employed. You might have a QA lab where maybe 50 percent of the machines aren't in use. You can power them down."

Or, thanks reporting features, you may just find that some systems simply aren't getting enough use to justify having them around at all.

See your savings
Reporting features are critical to the success of these types of solutions, according to the reps I spoke with. Admins can use them to see how effective their policies are, what savings they're reaping, and where there might be opportunity or need for tweaks. "There's no point in saving power if you can't show how much power you're saving -- and showing how much compliance there is," says Karayi.

Verdiem, which offers a power management product called Surveyor, uses the reporting features at the beginning of the implementation process to help companies gauge just what kind of savings they might reap. "We go into their organizations and install the client on a smattering of machines, and we use it to collect information about how efficient their power management policies actually are. Given user behavior and their policies, we see how much opportunity there is to save energy, and what the ROI would be," says Twito.

One of Verdiem's customers is the Lake Washington School District (LWSD) in Washington state. It has 23,500 students, 48 schools, and more than 11,000 PCs. LWSD has reaped more than $200,000 in savings per year through power management.

The solution garnered praise from the LWSD techies. "Surveyor lets us easily schedule when to leave the PCs on to automate IT tasks, while saving energy and money when no IT work is needed. And to date, use of Surveyor has not resulted in a single help desk call, which is refreshingly uncommon when new software is installed," says Bob Siemers, senior network engineer for the district.

The value proposition of desktop power management is indeed quite evident, and the vendors are finding that it's no longer just the folks in the operations and facilities department -- those who pay the electric bills -- that are asking about them. Now that green is the black among IT companies, technology departments are keen on reducing energy consumption. "Our typical point of contact has been facilities manager because they're in control of the power bill. But in the last six months, IT management is beginning to contact us. They're the primary source of incoming leads now."

In addition to the companies mentioned above, Altiris offers a free Energy Saver Toolkit, built on the company's systems management infrastructure. Additionally, LANDesk announced power management utility last March, which can be used with the LANDesk Management Suite, Security Suite, and Patch Manager via LANDesk Updates.

For more information on desktop power management, check out Energy Star's Web site. You might also look to 1E's Energy Awareness Campaign site, which has interesting information and links.

For home PCs, consider Uniblue's LocalCooling tool, offered for free. I've found it pretty easy to use, plus it tracks your energy savings.

Posted by Ted Samson on June 14, 2007 03:00 AM

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COMMENTS

I totally agree that running PCs 24/7 results in a waste of energy and an unnecessary increase in CO2 emissions. My suggestion is that instead of putting the PCs to sleep, get rid of them completely.

For most general business, government, and educational processes, diskless thin clients running off of centralized application servers provide a solution that can pay dividends in many ways.

Symbio Technologies provides a stateless thin client solution that contains absolutely no non-volatile memory, no OSs, no applications, and no network identifying information. All applications, data, and files are consolidated onto their appropriately scaled servers or NAS. All desktop administration is centralized to the server.

Our stateless thin client solution combines one Symbiont Boot Appliance (that boots diskless thin clients and directs them to the appropriate application server or servers) with up to 250 stateless desktop units.

These desktop units use less power when running full throttle (5 watts) than PCs use when they are turned off. They are fully solid state devices that take up very little (or no) real estate, have no moving parts, require no maintenance, and make no noise.

As they have no embedded operating systems, fans to break, or anything else that could cause obsolescence, these units can last several times longer than the standard PC "refresh" cycle. This eliminates the need to throw away perfectly good hardware each time the software changes.

With the software loaded once on a central server, there is no need for special management software to reimage each terminal. Simply load the update, upgrade, or patch on the server and every unit has it instantly.

As there is nothing on the desktop that requires maintenance or support, this technology completely eliminates the personnel costs associated with trouble shooting individual power supplies, hard drives, or other PC add-ons at the user's location. If a user reports a problem, network personnel can log in remotely to the server and fix it.

If something should happen to the unit where it actually stops working, a user could go to the closet, take one off the shelf, disconnect the monitor, keyboard, mouse and network interface cables from the old unit and simply plug these items into the new unit. Once the user pushes the on button, the new unit boots up and the user picks up from his last keystroke. There is no configuration, lost data, or loss in productivity.

As there is never any data on the desktop, businesses, health organizations, and security conscious organizations of all kinds can utilize stateless thin clients as part of an enterprise wide program to manage the access, flow, and storage of data.

If someone reading your blog is truly interested in reducing electrical costs, reducing CO2 emissions, reducing end-of-life disposal costs, and reducing landfill waste streams by simplifying their networks, they should look into stateless thin client technology.

Yes, I agree that PCs should be put to sleep. Only, I have a different definition of what the word "sleep" means.

Posted by: Lew Tischler at June 14, 2007 01:47 PM

This is fine for the environment, but you haven't accounted for lost productivity due to booting up and getting your desktop back to where you were at the end of the previous work day. Let's say you lose 15 minutes a day at say $40/hour for your salary. That is $10 a day. You can argue that you can do other productive work while waiting, but I think you can see my point. You are bound to lose a lot of time over a year. This cost in not counted anywhere.

Posted by: David Reed at June 15, 2007 10:12 AM

The savings may be obvious, but the costs are not trivial. Let's assume that it takes the average employee an extra minute every day to power up his or her system. I suspect it's more, but let's run the numbers. 1 minute x 5000 employees x 200 days per year = 1,000,000 minutes per year, or 16,667 hours per year of lost productive time. Is it worth trading 16,667 hours of productive time for $125,000? If your employees' time is worth more than $7.50 per hour, then you lose by powering down every night.

Posted by: Gordon at June 15, 2007 10:43 AM

The article fails to mention WHY people leave their PCs on all night. First off, many companies who lease space don't pay per KWh they use--it's either included in the rent or they pay a flat rate to the landlord ("use it or lose it"). In that case, there's a financial DISINCENTIVE in bothering users to shut down their machines or to use reporting & automatic power-down tools.

The other main reason is that many companies load so much software on their users' machines (anti-virus, SMS, Zenworks, firewalls, and so on) along with XP's tendency to consistently develop a slower boot, that many users find it easier to leave the machine on all the time instead of dealing with a 3GHz machine still needing 10 minutes to boot. Couple that with the fact that companies sometimes disable standby & hibernate on desktop machines (WHY???), and it's no wonder why their employees leave their machines on 5-7 days/week.

Posted by: Markian Zadony at June 15, 2007 11:33 AM

Definitely it is good to power down computers. Most of the time user are leaving their office and just logout.

When a service crash, users are not necessarily thing to restart computer leaving it in an unstable situation. Sometimes others reasons might happen and the computer need to be restart but it did not happen.

As for most electrical components, when it is not use, it should be off.

Posted by: Francois at June 15, 2007 12:15 PM

An argument in favor of leaving PCs on 7x24 is the heat generated during the winter months. Having the PC on all night takes some of the chill off in the morning. In a mild winter climate that may greatly reduce or eliminate the need for building heat. Air conditioning is needed for our core business in any event, so the added load is inconsequential.

Posted by: Bob at June 15, 2007 12:51 PM

Depending on the specifics .. one can argue the $ either way.
Energy (elec) consumption from the grid costs nearly the same regardless of usage (big picture)..
The cost of coal, gas, oil,etc... hasn't been the majority of your electric bill...
Distribution costs,power availability on demand, etc.. is the majority of the cost for power on the grid.

Everyone consume less .. get charged more for what you do use (assuming centralized power distribution)....result minimal $ saving

Otherwise, the savings are market driven (first to reduce power will save $ until market re-stablizes with new pricing)

What does change ... less polution...
For this reason ..good to reduce energy consumption.

Posted by: John Lambert at June 15, 2007 01:06 PM

Lew Tischler is on the right path but as usual we are trying to find answers in the future rather then looking in the past and present!

The stateless Thin Client has existed for a very long time at Sun Microsystems. It's called a SunRay. However it's no longer just for Solaris. SunRay talk to Windows, Linux, Citrix, VMWare (VDI), Solaris, X11... you name it.

Above and beyond the advantages that Lew talked about above, the SunRay Server Software that brokers all these SunRay clients runs on both X86/X64 and SPARC. We actually recommend running it on the most energy efficient server on the market today our T1000 or T2000 server. (For you in California, you even get a credit from your energy company for purchasing one to replace an existing server!)

Planning to migrate to Vista some day? ...or want to change from a Windows desktop to Linux Desktop or Java Desktop? All this is possible without changing or upgrading the hardware on everybody's desks.

Now add the Java Card security and session mobility features and you're looking at the final desktop hardware architecture selection you will have to make for a very long time.

On top of this the performance monitoring tool is free. It's called Canary and can be downloaded from the Sun website.

If any of you are truly looking to save power, save money, simplify desktop management and gain true platform independence while maintaining a secure environment, SunRay is for you.

"Only 4 easy payments of $19.99!" ...just kidding but check us out. If you havent looked at Sun recently you will be pleasantly surprised.

Posted by: Sylvain at June 15, 2007 03:03 PM

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