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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?"
Don't people typically perform backups/updates at night?
A lot of places require machines to be on overnight because that is when automated update, monitoring and scanning tasks can run without impacting users. Of course, the machine could be configured to automatically shut down when this is finished. Actually shutting down is typically highly inconvenient since the machine loses state due to 30 years of bad OS design when this happens but a suspend-to-disk mode is a viable alternative.
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I would go with a reward plan. You could do something like give the top three most energy efficient people a gift certificate to the campus eatery (or whatever really). Calculate how much money is saved (out of everyone participating) and use part of that money to create a pool for the prizes. (It seems like for a large enough group of people, the energy and maintenance costs would reduce considerably, but I wouldn't really know ;)
I know I would definitely turn off my work PC every night if I got a free lunch!
I'm at a university and many of my colleagues leave their machines on overnight because they sometimes need access to their machine, either to retrieve a file or to run a program. If the IT folks provided everyone with a wake-on-lan script then everyone could turn off their machine. For years this has seemed to me like a no-brainer.
Is there some security or other downside I'm not aware of? Is WOL not reliable?
I did this a while back, the trick is some machines are 24/7 others are 9-5 ers. I coordinated with dept heads to identify what entire departments could be shut down then scripted a prompt to fire at 7:00pm to look for any user feedback, working late crowd, then 30 minutes later do a shutdown if no response was received. This took care of most machines. I never got to the mixed departments, greener pastures called.
I did a project in My Campus with more than 8000 desktop computers.
It saved something like 33% power consumption (measured, before and after).
after midnight all desktops that are not in the excluded list hibernate automatically.
I used python + MFC . Was very easy and simple.
It is time for the Sysadmins start to program and make better use from the technology (not just, next-next-finish)..
And I didn't receive any raise besides saving a lot of money to University.
Shameless promotion: Looking for a new job in developed country.
Just a thought: the (supposed) increased failure rate for HDDs wouldn't come within 6 months. During the first period, it's instead perfectly reasonable that the reduced number of power-on hours decreases the calendar-based failure rate. The interesting issue is whether your HDD failure rates increases significantly within a 1-3 year timeframe.
Among other projects, I worked on the power supply controls for the Cray Super Dragon. No, you probably never heard of it, but it became the Sun ES-10K.
This box had variable voltage power supples which required me to adjust them from cold start. I had to calibrate A/D, take samples, tweak, etc all through JTAG and cumulatively it was quite slow. Like over an hour.
My manager was not impressed, I shrugged and said "who turns these off?" - and the marketing droid/product manager said "they do in Japan". Fine. The hardware people were nice enough to give me multiple JTAG lines and power up time shrank to acceptable limits.
I have never been certain if this was a "Spinal Tap" riff or it was really true.
You might be able to set up an "exception" ticket with the IT department, or set up a Magic Packet arrangement tied to their machine.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Most failures of any electrical or electronic system occur during startup. That's when subsystems haven't fully stabilized and experience high inrush currents, with concomitant spike heating and other stresses. It's the same reason incandescent lights usually pop when switched on, but rarely fail when left lit.
I never switch any of my systems off, and failures are extremely rare. I have all monitors and flat panels automatically power down, but I leave hard drives running continuously. About the only time I have to replace something is when I upgrade every few years. Yes, it adds a few dollars to my electric bill, but I save in other areas there, and it is worth the peace of mind.
Even fans (which are the weak link in most PCs) can run for ages if you spend the money to buy quality parts. It helps to have a good HEPA filter in your computer room, and keep the machines off the floor. Fans last a long time without dust in the bearings, and a dust-free computer runs cooler as well.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I worked for a very large (top-3) pharmaceutical for years. They always asked employees to shut off their computers at night when they went home.
Then one day, they sent out a campus-wide email telling people to leave their computers on all night and over the weekend. They used the CPU cycles to run high-performance scientific computing jobs, saving the cost of buying a supercomputer.
Of course, not every company has a need for spare CPU cycles. This place did a lot of protein-shape searches etc..
The CS department at the college I went to used to turn off all the PCs at night but now has them set up to start doing scientific calculations during the times when the labs are closed. They use power during this time, but it's not wasted.
14 hours a day times 52 times 5 times average power-consumption for an idling desktop times 10K employees works out to:
14*52*5*0.15*10000 = 5.460.000 Kwh of electric power, WORSE in the time when you use AC, because you'll need additional AC to get rid of that extra heat.
With average power-prices of 10 cent, you'll spend more than half a million dollar just paying for the electricity, in practice with AC and all you'll probably pay a million.
So, you saved $80K and wasted a million. Way to go !
Does this seem like a really obvious extension to switches? Why not power down ports and then power them on via 802.1x requests. Kind of hits two birds with one stone.
Computers don't use a whole lot when they idle. Unless you are loading them up with lots of drives and a big GPU, you'll probably find they draw in the realm of 50 watts just idling. Ok so looking at my power bill I get about $0.06 per kilowatt hour of energy. At 50 watts of draw it takes 20 hours for a computer to use a kWh. Running the numbers I come up with about $100,000. So assuming the costs quoted by the grand parent are correct, one patch time would just about pay the power bill the whole year and two would go over it.
For better or worse, electricity isn't very expensive so it really isn't an area for huge cost savings. Also normal office computers really just don't draw much power when idle. They often don't draw that much even in operation. Enthusiasts get a little over excited with power supply sizes, but it's fairly rare to find the computer that actually needs a large PSU. You discover that even a system decked out with an 8800 and a bunch of harddrives would probably work just fine with a 400 watt PSU.
The good news is that Intel is working on something that may be a solution to this. Intel AMT should allow for systems to be remotely managed, including when they are powered off (computers don't go all the way off, they are still drawing a little bit). So you should be able to have them power up, do what they need to do, then power back down.
You could also use that magic packet, to signal the computer to wake when the user swipes their access card first thing in the morning. By the time they reach their desk, their pc would be up and running. Ok, you have to link the access systems to a control server, but it wouldn't take too much hacking. They probably log accesses on a server anyway, so use that one.
BITD when I was an IT support type in a Cambridge University college, the library of that college had a small computer room with around half-a-dozen Macs (this was in the OS 8.x days.) These machines seemed particularly flaky, often requiring PRAM resets, restores and the occasional rebuild. It was only after a while that I learned why these machines were so flaky.
Every power outlet in that room was connected to a kill switch on the wall and come 5pm, when the room closed, yep you guessed it - someone hit the kill switch. Irrespective of whether students were using the machines and irrespective of which particular part of the write cycle the HD head was at.
Paid 50% in taxes, escaped from robbers.
Twice threaten by fire guns.
Being honest when everyone is "taking a good time"..
Voted, volunteer work..Teaching..
We can change places..
I dream when I may take a dinner and walk some quarters by night without fear..
We ask our users to reboot their PC & not to shut them down for the patch reason. Unlike most, we keep up to date with patches. We watch Secunia and automatically roll out kill bits for insecure active x controls, automatically patch Windows via WSUS and all the other pieces of software such as Adobe's, Real, Apple, et al. That is a lot of software.
We do this automatically eg automated.. If we do it while the non-admin user is signed on, many of these packages fail to install. Flash and others require the logged on user to be an Admin, or to run while no-one is signed on.
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So what do we do? Have users turn off their PC & thus never get patched, but save money on power? We do have AMD Cool & Quiet enabled on 150 machines. These PC's go into a lower power use state. We do use WoL and some people do shut down, but it works on maybe 50% of the machines with WoL. Many do not have WoL.
Also, in the winter months such as now, the cost of those PCs being powered on is negated by the cost of heating the building otherwise. I guess this makes more sense in our environment, where we are staffed 24/7 365 -- just less staff at night.
Windows has an API to shut down the machine. One could easily write a program that checks for use (Mouse/keyboard) and prompts a user after x minutes of inactivity (60?) Perhaps also checking for system activity. If you detect no use, prompt the user that you are going to shutdown after 15 minutes. Then issue the API to shutdown. If no user is signed on, then just shut down. If the CEO is signed on then perhaps do nothing. This API works around 90%+ of the time in my experience.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376868(VS.85).aspx
Or perhaps hibernate if it is supported.
Someone could code this up in a few hours and release it on Sourceforge..
Harddrives are mechanical devices, and are wearing out anytime they are powered up and running. While I'm sure that a drive does get stressed a bit more when it is turned on, I can guarantee you that a drive that runs for 40-50 hours a week is going to last longer than a drive that runs 168 hours a week.
There are also other benefits. A harddrive that has motors or bearings that are starting to fail can be caught when they have trouble spinning up and be replaced before they totally fail, preventing data loss. Furthermore, if a head crash occurs when no one is around (during the night or the weekend), having the the heads banging and grinding against the platters for hours or days is really going to hamper any recovery efforts.
Seriously. You need to take a couple of simple electrical courses. Specifically, volts-for-dolts a physics course on magnetism, and a practical, hands-on course working with electric motors. All handily part of an electrical engineering degree. When there is load on an electric generator, it takes more energy to keep it moving. Of course, we need to keep it moving at the same speed (60Hz or 50Hz, depending on which part of the world you're in) at all times, so that means using more coal, gas, whatever, when there is higher demand, and nearly none when there is no demand (not that that ever happens, but I will admit to the fact that you never use no energy even when no energy is being demanded).
In fact, my alma mater pointed out that they had a huge electric motor (approx 20' tall) that did nothing but spin (not doing any actual "work") to lower power demand for the university. When the capacitance of the grid got too high (such that voltage and current were too far out of phase with one another), they'd turn on the motor (basically, an oversized inductor) to correct the phase, lowering the demand on the external grid, resulting in a real cost savings to the university on their huge electrical bills.
The CO2 output of your carbon-based generators will be drastically lower at night than during the day. It's really that simple. I'm no greenie, but this is simple fact, and completely non-controversial. Just go ask your local power utility.
This is what happens at my College. After a certain time a box pops up saying it will shut down in five minutes unless you tell it no.
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Yep, But I wanted a more elegant solution, what I did:
1- Used python to scan network on port 139;
2- If it is alive do a list, check against list of excluded;
3- Did a binary static 16kb executable that uses:
Some classes to check if the computer is a server or a desktop and wich kind.
CallNtPowerInformation --> to activate Hibernate function (if windows 2000 and superior)
SetSuspendState --> to make the machine suspend. (if windows 2000 and superior)
I think the cleverness was using the port 139 to check if it is a windows and it is alive (very fast, and doesn't have to use ping..)
Checking which systems are server or desktop and what kind.
(very important to avoid hibernate a server)
And making a static binary that can run in any win32 system remotely.
Snippets to help --> Be aware! Am I a Bad Programmer only a dedicated SysAdmin
To activate Hibernate feature (will check on the box in hibernate panel)..
void activatehibernate()
{
bool active;
active = TRUE;
CallNtPowerInformation(SystemReserveHiberFile,&active,sizeof(BOOLEAN), NULL, 0);
}
To hibernate the machine nicely (asking the applications by system events to hibernate)
SetSuspendState(TRUE,FALSE,FALSE);
If you have more solutions or want make a open source program together just send an email to me hcano@solucoes.net
I would cheerfully power down if IE7 offered to restore my previous session. It's one of the features I love about Firefox and Opera, but I can't use them for everything. At day's end I may have ten or twelve browser windows open, three to six tabs in use in each window. Time to leave, and I'm in the middle of researching something, juggling many windows and tabs. No, I don't want to bookmark any of the stuff, it's just work in process, and I've aready got around 5000 "favorites" to deal with. I dread the monthly morning-after Wednesday for just this reason, when Windows Update cheerfully tells me it had to restart my machine for me.
I work for a medium size European bank. Total workstations aprx. 22000 in 13 different countries.
We used to leave all our PCs on all the time in order to run updates, patches etc.
In my area of operations there are only about 3300 PCs. Nine months ago we implemented a policy where all users were required to turn off their PCs (not servers) at the end of day. Wake-on-LAN was used to turn the PCs on during the night for updates and 15 minutes before the start of the workday.
Very conservatively, we estimate that we will save about EUR153000 (USD225000) every year (I live in a country with very high electricity rates).
So, it is definitely worth it financially, our users were not adversely affected at all and it helped morale by making the workplace a greener place.
Finally ... I thought we'd have a few more electrical engineers here at /. who would post what you did about peak loads and billing.
Electric utilities are all about peak load - they have to size their generators and transmission lines around those needs. Compared to the capital costs of building a new generation plant, fuel is pretty darn cheap.
Mix in the fact that they can't just start and stop most of those generators as needed. Once that boiler is going, it stays that way for at least a few days and nights. Managing the peak load reduces the number of generators that need to be spinning, since they can't (cheaply) fire up one when the peak hits.
The net result: there is a lot of electricity available at off-peak hours. Some of that is starting to be used, with things like AC chillers that store 'cold' at night, and hydro sites where they pump water uphill.
As electricity prices rise, you'll see power management capabilities improve, and become more visible at the consumer level. Integrated power management will also help adoption of solar and wind.
My Company has "white" power outlets and "pink" power outlets. Pink outlets provide power 24/7, the white ones all shut off (along with the office lights) when the building alarm is armed. All offices have at least one "pink" outlet so if you really want your PC to stay alive you connect to that one.
Emacs has had auto-save for at least twenty years. This greatly reduces the problem of machines shutting down or crashing before the user saves the buffer. Doesn't MS Word have autosave yet?
This is actually a true story. Some guy had actually the same concerns as you. He ended up putting a screen saver on all computer with a simple message: "Please, shutdown your computer when leaving". That's it. About 80% of the people responded favorably and powered down their computer without any supervision. All it took was a reminder in the form of a screen saver message.
You are the sys admin are you not? Maintaining the operation of the network is YOUR responsibility. That includes maintaining it's carbon footprint.
Push out an update to disable screen savers, turn monitors off after 15 minutes of inactivity, and hibernate after 1.5 hours of inactivity (this saves them from having to boot up after lunch), and set Windows to require administrative privileges to change power management settings.
Piece of cake. If they run Linux s/Windows/Linux above.
You may find this interesting. I used to work at a nuclear power plant. The cooling reservoir was connected via a spillway to a nearby river. To cover peak loads, there was a hydroelectric plant on the spillway. At night, the power company I worked for bought tons of cheap electricity from another utility to run the hydro plant backwards to refill the reservoir.
The plant I worked at stayed running at 100% the whole time, but as far as I know, its power was not used to refill the reservoir. I assume that was because the utility that owned the plant could sell that station's power for more than it was paying the other utility for the power to refill the reservoir.
One of the engineers told me it took approximately twice as much power to refill the lake as was obtained by draining it, and this happened on a fairly nightly basis during the summer. I used to run a few miles at the plant every morning, and there were usually fishermen trying to get as close to lake side of the dam as possible without getting chased off by the guards. The churning water apparently stirred up a lot of stuff and attracted the hungry fish in the lake.
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