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Do Any Companies Power Down at Night?

Posted by Soulskill on from the when-else-can-employees-run-their-torrents dept.

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?"

2 of 646 comments (clear)

  1. Do you support wake-on-lan? by rmcd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. Re:Hibernate by superflit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.