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?"

Comments

Good idea!

[cromar]

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!

Do you support wake-on-lan?

[rmcd]

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?

Re:Do you support wake-on-lan?

[arth1]

WOL takes longer than the timeout period for many services (including, but not limited to WINS, and some windows networking components will take up to three quarters of an hour to recover if a service is initially reported as unavailable while the machine appears to be up).

Another concern is whether your servers are up to handling all the PCs coming on at once in the morning. People leaving Outlook running at all times is actually a Good Thing for IT, cause the alternative of thousands of people hitting the Exchange servers at the same minute would kneel even the biggest distributed servers. Then there's similar concerns for the domain controllers, DHCP servers, proxy servers, or you have it. Leaving a substantial part of the machine park already logged in can save a lot of hardware and configuring.
If shutting everything down, at least a staggered start-up could be prudent.

Re:Hibernate

[superflit]

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.

Waste not, want not..

[Ancil]

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..

workstations by day, cluster by night

[nategoose]

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.

Re:We power down at weekends

[Eivind]

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 !

Re:Easy fix

[smoker2]

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.

Re:Increased probability of HDD failure

[toddestan]

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.