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

Don't Power Down

[paulevans]

For security reasons we never powered down at my last company. For 2 reasons:

1: Hardware
When you turn on hardware is when the hardware has the highest percentage of failure. More specifically, hard drives. First hand experience, for those employees who just didn't follow the rules they had 2x the hardware malfunctions as someone who left their machine on all the time. So if a computer that gets turned on breaks more often, what is it going to be like for you to fix systems that break during power-up with a 8,000 client base? I wouldn't do it.

2: Security
At night is when we ran updates, ran virus scans, monitored systems. If these are ran during the day, you will get complaints and your staff/employees will start shutting down the services in order to work.

Suggestion:
I would look at 'phone book' size computers, like the Dell Optiplex GX270,GX280,620. These systems use much less electricity than their desktop counterparts. We had GX270's with a 175watt pull, compared to 450watt for a desktop. Getting hardware that meets needs, and uses only as much energy resources as needed is where I would start looking. And with 8000 clients, any change here will show massive gain in energy savings.