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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 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 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.
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 !
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.
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..
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.
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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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.