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Do Any Companies Power Down at Night?
An anonymous reader writes "My Health Sciences Campus has about 8,000 desktop computers, and on any given night about half of them are left on. I know this because I track all the MAC addresses in case there is a virus outbreak. Aside from the current fad of 'being green', has anyone had any success in encouraging users to power-down at night? You could potentially eliminate running bots, protect yourself from the next virus outbreak, keep your data safe, etc. Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?"
I won't go into the green topic. But here's a suggestion: Why don't you just shut down ethernet switches and routers at night? That would be just as effective at halting propagation of virii/bots, and would be much easier to effect.
:-)
And improved employee morale could result as well, since what would be the point of working late?
Employ strict log-on hours and use a tool for remote shutdown/startup from the monitoring station.
..::ALWAYS : watching::..
It's probably smarter to track IP addresses unless you control all the switches :)
Common wisdom (which may or may not be actual wisdom) suggests that powering up/down of computer power supplies is one of the largest sources of "wear" on computers nowadays, and so it's best to avoid that (replacing system components and increased costs in the industries to make this possible should be factored into eco-costs as well). Having systems go to sleep to various degrees presumably gets one much of the way towards being more eco-friendly without so much of this wear. That said, presumably a rigourous analysis on the topic would provide more reliable guidance.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
It's time that all large campuses configured their systems hibernate automatically, if left unused for 30 minutes.
Really, there is no reason NOT to use the power management settings built into the OS.
Shutting down at the end of the day and powering up the next morning increases the probability of HDD failure. It's better for the HDD to run all the time than to cold boot every morning.
I work for a large blue chip company and we have a strict policy of powering down at night (including monitor). We regularly audit the records to ensure the machine is powered down and users who are not are requested to always remember. A few users take a few reminders in order to do so and I have heard every excuse under for why they left it on and while some are valid the majority (95%) are not. Our reasons for pushing this policy is purely to save money and reduce unnecessary running time of the equipment. However we are in a position where only laptops users have VPN access so if they need to login to the network from home they already have their laptop with them. If we had open VPN access to desktop users I am sure we would see a lot of users leaving their computer on so that they can RDP into it over VPN.
It took about 6 months before we were at a realistic level. We have 633 desktops on our site so there is normally always a valid reason for one or two to be left on (valid reasons being batch copy, verify or processing of files). For those interested we have had a reduction in the amount of equipment failure (HDD mainly) as well as pretty good cost savings for power. Not to mention running greener (which regardless of if you believe in global warming or not is good).
I tend to leave the computer on overnight, but with things like monitor power-down and CPU idling enabled. When it's not doing anything it drops about 90% of it's power consumption after 15 minutes, and even when working with the monitor off (eg. running the nightly backup) it's still running at less than 50% of full power. If I power it off, by comparison, it can't run it's virus scan, backup, update check and the like overnight and has to do those things while I'm trying to use it during the day. Plus there's wear and tear to consider, I've noticed that the office computers that get turned off and on every day tend to fail and need replacing several times before mine (that stays on all the time) has a failure.
So my preference is to leave computers running but with power-saving features set to minimize power without shutting things down. This means hard drives continue to spin but the CPU goes into low-power idle mode. The monitor goes to suspend mode (beam and deflection power is off but the circuits and coils are kept warm), not powered-down completely. That seems to be the best balance between reducing power consumption, allowing it to run maintenance operations overnight and minimizing wear and tear and thermal stress on the components. If management absolutely insists on ignoring those last two in favor of the first, wake-on-LAN is essential to allow nightly maintenance to happen.
You could always roll out a job on the computer to automatically reboot or shutdown the computer at a certain time.
... but now IT has loaded so much crap on it ("desktop agents" [ie apps that spy on me], antivirus, patches, etc) that it is fully 15-20 minutes after turning it on before it is usable. So now I never turn it off. I did the hibernation thing for awhile, but then it stopped working for some reason and I haven't been able to fix it. And if I ask IT to fix it, their solution is always the same for every problem - wipe the machine - a tad inconvenient for me, but pretty efficient for them I suppose. Sigh.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Reducing energy consumption isn't just about saving money, it's about not fucking up the planet too.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
What's the cost of 10k * 261 days * 12 hours of power?
Surely you could use wake on lan to wake the machines then do your rollout 10 minutes later? Or do a patch install when the machine is turned on and connects to the domain controller?
In windows I'm sure you can set the time between warning appearing and shutdown ocuring. Give 600 seconds warning and you could probably shutdown 90% of the machines overnight.
In the comments and original message there are the following: -- Aside from the current fad of 'being green' -- -- I won't go into the green topic. -- -- nor any desire to "go green" -- In general this "community" is a group of technically minded people who are not opposed to putting science ahead of PR and marketing. Why on earth would such a group be so afraid of something because it is green. We all have to share the planet and I'm guessing most of us are not becoming billionaires by destroying it, so why is it such a problem for so many of you.
I leave my computer on for a couple reasons. One is that if I'm in the middle of doing something and its time to call it a day, its easier to resume that if I leave everything as is. The second is that I may get paged to fix something and would need to remotely log into my computer from home, which requires it to be on.
I suppose if you could find a way to remotely hibernate a computer and remotely unhibernate it then you could potentially save on the electric bill.
Unfortunately, "fucking up the planet" as you so eloquently put it isn't in the books as a cost.
Someone might be using it ... there are always a few late users. Trying to determine if a computer is in use in order to shut it down isn't always that simple.
... it won't be a 100% solution, but most people would probably comply, so for the comparatively little effort put in I bet you can hardly get a better return.
I suggest a simpler, low-tech solution - just stick up visible signs in the labs, and on some of the major office floors, asking people to shut down the computers in the evenings
Just the energy savings on that many computers would be not insignificant.
In windows I'm sure you can set the time between warning appearing and shutdown ocuring. Give 600 seconds warning and you could probably shutdown 90% of the machines overnight.
You're assuming that 100% of machines in use are doing something interactive (and therefore have someone sat at them). This is frequently not the case.
Well, in a university, "scientific calculations" could mean actually running simulations/models/whatever, that is, things for which you would normally use some super computer. So it is not necessarily a question of "getting away with this", it might make perfect operational sense and boost the uni's available computational power and thus productivity. Depending on what industry you work in, you could do a similar thing in a company, for example a nightly distributed build-and-extensive-regression-test in a software shop, and save on purchasing and operating dedicated computers. There are lots of quite productive uses for distributed computing. You just need to think about what your company might do with it. Of course, if there is no productive thing the computers could be doing, they are better turned off.
I'm sorry you're not too.
Cant be as bad as Rite Aid, they require the management at the store to leave the computers, terminals AND EVERY light on even when the store is closed and empty.
They say its to help deter someone from breaking into the store and trying to steal stuff.....which im sure if you did the numbers would actually cost the company more to leave everything on, than to have a theft every once in a while....
Do lights really stop break-ins?
"an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind"
Why not just have the machine shut down automatically on logout if it's between two specified times (eg. 9pm and 8am)?
Nobody else has this sig.
Also I don't think signs will have anywhere near the impact you imagine. We can't even get users to not eat around the machines.
Why not set the PC's to power off automagically? You could save yourself a lot of hassles...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
In hybrid (Windows-*nix) environments, logging off, suspend or hibernate means terminating all networked application (X-Windows and Xterm) sessions and having to waste 20 minutes each morning to re-login on the hosts and re-open everything. With even junior engineer wages being $20+/hour, those minutes can easily cost over $5 each day and make spending $1/day on the power bill save $4/day on the bottom line.
Every power or network outage and mandatory-reboot Windows update, even overnight, usually causes major cursing across the office.
It's amazing how people can have such strong feelings about an issue and have them be based on such utter nonsense.
Have you ever jump-started a car? Did you not notice how when you connect jumper cables to the vehicle with the dead battery, the running car has its engine get slogged down by the extra load? And does it not stand to reason that if you want to hold the engine at the same RPM (as an electric utility has to do to hold line frequency) you have to feed the engine more gas to do so?
If you draw more power out of a circuit, somewhere, more power has to be put in.
Peak load is why extra power plants need to be built. Sure, it is great to decrease that to prevent the extra emissions. But the loads at all times of the day and night should be reduced as well where possible.
Because "virii" is retarded from any angle. If you want to make up a "smart" sounding word use "viri" instead. It's still wrong, but it's less idiotically wrong than "virii". "Viri" at least has some logic to it, like "Vaxen". Imagine if some idiots had pluralized "Vax" as "Vaaxen". It's wrong and makes no sense.
In a corporate environment, that sort of decision is made at a corporate policy level, and not at an IT personnel level. Nobody would get fired.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If I were a taxpayer in your district, I would appreciate the savings on the school's electric bill.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.