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Why IT Won't Power Down PCs
snydeq writes "Internal politics and poor leadership on sustainable IT strategies are among the top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management — to the tune of $2.8 billion wasted per year powering unused PCs. According to a recent survey, 42 percent of IT shops do not manage PC energy consumption simply because no one in the organization has been made responsible for doing so — this despite greater awareness of IT power-saving myths, and PC power myths in particular. Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.' In other words, resources spent by IT vs. the permanent energy crisis appear to result in little payback for IT."
Doubly so for IT Ops. If the business tells IT it wants PC's powered off when not in use, then it will happen. So far, for the most part, that businesses haven't asked. It's disingenuous to lay this problem at the feet of the IT department.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I worked as head of Critical Factilities Engineering for a major financial services provider with a 1 MM sq ft campus. There were just over 4000 employees on the campus, each one with at least 1 computer at his/her office/cube. After having a very expensive energy audit performed, a potential savings was (big surprise) shutting down PCs.
Despite calculating that the organization could save $75K annually (this was a conservative estimate), their marketing department put a stop to the idea. Why marketing? Because the company had just gone through a "rebranding" and the marketing department had designed a new screensaver for all workstations with the new logo/slogan. None of these computers were in client facing positions, so effectively, they were insistent on wasting energy to advertise....to themselves!
No, I'm not kidding.
It's nothing more than the classic "Not my problem". It's a real shame that there are so few people in the world today willing to do something about a problem that "isn't thier problem".
I'm sure it has nothing to do with bad hardware or bad drivers that randomly refuse to wake up from hibernation and the hassles and expense of supporting related issues.
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.'
No shit? What about hardware costs? Employee salaries? Cost of software licenses? Those too??? What are you, some sort of support department that doesn't sell your company's product??
Whale
As soon as I can apply a group policy to our Windows PCs to go to sleep yet still be available via RDP for end users without requiring them to jump through hoops or writing some script they have to run to trigger wake on lan, then I'll have our PCs use power saving.
Until then, they run all the time so when a user happens to be out of office and needs to access their desktop they can still VPN in and use RDP to get to their PC.
Feel free to point me at a graceful solution, but the best I've seen so far is a web page to send the wake on lan packet. Thats nice and all, but I'd rather just pay the power bill instead, its far easier than explaining it to everyone who isn't a geek.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
99% of the time, if I'm not sitting in front of it reading Slashdot, my work PC is merrily chugging along folding proteins and using up company electricity.
But that other 1% of the time, I'm using it from home, because I've gotten called up to fix some urgent client problem.
To save that $75 worth of electricity, my company would have to require that I drive in to the office every time a client has a hiccup that I can diagnose and fix in five minutes. I don't get paid by the hour, but I'm fortunate enough to work someplace that values my time -- including my non-work time. They would consider that $75 to be money well spent to keep me able, and most importantly *willing*, to take time out on a Saturday to fix a simple problem.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It's a pain in the ass, no one really cares, and the first time some manager had data loss from a machine shutting itself down, the policy would end.
If we all sat down and set up our networks so that everything correctly booted and shutdown when the network told it to, we could attach power management stuff to the whole network...Assuming that everything correctly saved state when it shut down, so that people didn't lose all their work when their machine automatically shut itself off.
They're treating this like it's just lazy admins, but its a knotty problem, and not a particularly critical one. In datacenters the computers are the primary energy draw, in office buildings it's light and climate control, and, judging by the heating bills in the winter, the computers aren't really heating the building up that much.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Now that really was a useless study. Internal politics and poor leadership in IT are the cause of almost every single problem in IT.
I'm always amazed when large shops have no power savings features enabled. A lot of it has to do with the inability to manage power saving features from within Group Policy. Thankfully Vista added this ability. There is also a tool created for the EPA that adds this functionality to GP. It's a bit of a hack, but it does work. I'm always amazed why companies don't at least turn on the power saving features on their default profiles when they set them up. You set the monitor to turn off after 10 minutes, and you switch from the Always On profile to the Portable / Laptop Profile. Changing the profile enables SpeedStep which saves about 4W at idle and every time the monitor turns off you're saving 30-40 watts depending on the model. It takes about 20 minutes to do this before you deploy and image. It'll pay for itself in a large company in a day and has no impact on automatic updates or virus scans.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
"Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.'"
In other words, they aren't incentivized to care.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I don't work that side of the IT group (I'm in development), but in a few places I've worked the workstations needed to be kept alive to perform maintenance at times when it would not affect employee work. Things like asset tracking, system/firewall upgrades, application software install and upgrades, disk optimization, etc.
It's like the problem with unplugging TVs when not in use. You can't use a remote control to turn it on if the remote sensor is not getting power first. And help desk really doesn't want to have to walk around the building flipping switches by hand.
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Since when is IT given an electric bill. It's not like an individual department a line item electric bill they have to budget for. It all comes out of the same operational overhead, same as water and heating. Besides, the vast majority of computer users aren't in IT anyway, so why would IT be billed for non IT workers.
We actually have signs that have just appeared showing a $600k/year savings if everyone shut off their computers. These numbers are obtained during long weekends when an extra effort is taken to ensure people power down.
sign up for a boinc project, then your computer won't be 'unused,' enabling you to run it 24/7 w/o guilt.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
There are a number of admins out there that won't power down any server even if it's the only way to fix a problem that's trashing their files and network.
Sometimes it's because they don't 'have the authority' to down the machines.
Other times it's because they get unrealistic bonuses for unbroken uptime, and they are greed cretins who'd rather see their work go down the tubes for money.
I know that it's rarely an issue with downing non-servers, and most admins are responsible as well as being the rarely disputed managers of their boxes, but there are way too many fools and scum.
If you're curious, yes, I've dealt with a large number of those two types I just listed. They have no pride in their work, and give all admins a bad name. But that's all fodder for a different rant.
The OS and hardware should incorporate power saving into machines that are logged out.
Our users are instructed to logout, but to leave their machines on for patches and the like.
If the OS could detect when the user was logged out and no services in the background where doing things we could
really turn down the machine.
A logged off machine's cpu could virtually go to sleep, the harddrives slow to 5200rpm or lower, the monitor go to sleep, and so on.
yes it's not as good as shutting the computer completely off, but maybe with some better types of wake on lan we can get as close as possible. Or scheduled turn on and off. Like tell windows to shut off from 7:00 P.M. till 1:00....turn on to get updates and then shut back down.
Ulitmately this just needs to be the default for future version of OSs like windows and the like. I think we really have to make it a brain dead for IT as possible. I've got enough other crap to worry about...although I do worry about the world engergy problems.
Unless one's job is task oriented, then one will necessarily leave apps open to maintain context.
How many editing sessions do you leave open when you quit for the day/fall asleep at your keyboard?
... and thus could not be moved. So IT powered everything where they wanted to make a squatters claim to data center floor space. My favorite example was an SGI Challenge, we hadn't used SGI in 3 years, let alone the Challenge. The only thing plugged into this thing was power, no other cables of any type.
That's what the cost-savings per computer would be, $0.50 a week, $26.00 per year, per computer.
More opinion here.
I've got your sig, right here.
Just reread the referenced threads - and noticed that both articles were roundly rejected as being complete bunk. Nice to see that this article has managed to get itself related to THOSE winners. Whoohoo!
Nothing built into XP, Vista, or Group Policy supports time-of-day power management. Many cases the user never wants their PC to sleep/hibernate from 9-5, but after 7 it's fair game. Microsoft doesn't address such a situation. It's either all-or-nothing. The alternative is to spend a lot of time/money acquiring some 3rd party tool like Verdiem, but buying an enterprise tool, versus enabling a feature you already have, means most people won't do it.
Saving money out of our power budget just constricts our budget for the next year. We can't re-allocate those funds to buying more servers, or upgrading our core switches, or even getting more cat6 laid out in our server room.
So I think the article is correct, in that I'll just keep wasting energy and allow my budget not to get constricted.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.
I am sure there are some shops like this, but overall a business does not manage the power of PCs for an IT budget. They pay the power bill. Now the server rooms needs to account for power but that is because they need enough juice to run their machines - but that is different then PCs. Servers typically need to be up 24/7
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
How would you enforce that policy?
A 3 strike policy before RDAs or something?
probably not.
You have to look at the industry to be able to properly view this kind of question because in the end, as all of us know, IT can only do so much to influence the users we support. And lemme tell ya, we tried a Power Down policy here, and in this industry we don't get the most technical people for users, so people were hibernating their PCs, or rebooting, some just turning off their monitors et.al
Not only that, but once it was realized it wasn't working, my first question came about. What do we do to punish users who don't power down? Can you imagine the HR nightmare that would spawn from someone getting disciplined over powering down? (And no I don't think that is "OK", just the reality of the situation".
It's sad that businesses not only don't seem to care about cost saving measures, but also don't prop people up when they FIND those cost savings for them......innovation is dying because no one is nurturing it
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
It's funny, I work at a school where all the pcs shut off at 8:00 every night.
The major push to make it that way was provided for by the students. They were very concerned by the energy use of our computers. Good for them.
I work in a high rise office building. Our power is included in our lease for the space. There is no incentive for me to power down workstations at night. That being said, you could argue that I would be helping everyone for the greater good. It still comes down to me expending resources without any direct benefit either way. The lease is not cheaper if I use less power. If my office paid per kwh, then it makes sense. Till then, my workstations stay on at night.
Oh and my workstations do not sit idle. Full anti-virus scans and updates are performed in off hours in order to minimize impact during the work day.
What could possibly go wrong?
Leaving PC's on when they are not used is most probably a terrible waste, but I suspect that numbers about losses due to this are probably not very accurate. At least I have never seen evidence that those calculations take into account the simple fact that energy never dissapears, it only changes nature:
This way unused PC's basically transform electrical energy into heat... with 100% efficiency (!). In many parts of the world however, during important parts of the year, heating is necessary. Heating costs a certain amount of energy, whether it comes from burning gas or oil directly or from electricity is just a matter of a difference in price (heat generated from electricity is probably more expensive). Of course you'd say that leaving the heating on during the night in a building that is only used during the day is also a waste, but take into consideration that (big) buildings do have quite a considerable thermal mass, so if you keep it warmer over night, the next day you still need less energy to heat it up again.
Conclusion: when the heating is actively used, leaving your PC (or light-bulb, stand-by transformer or whatever) on when not used, will still save you money on the gas bill (but cost you more on electricity of course). The overall balance is still for a loss of course, but in some situations, a significantly smaller loss than many people tend to think.
The same idea is true for energy saving light bulbs, btw, but that's for a different discussion.
I've been told on many occasions that turning it on and off, and heating & cooling, flexes the motherboard and will lead to premature failure. Also, hard drives spinning up and down all the time moves the magnetic domains "outward" and so your data all accumulates near the outer edge of the disk and the head has a tougher and tougher time reading it all in. Also turning on and off the monitor makes the colors become less bright, so after a few years all you see are "fall" colours like yellows, reds, and oranges... eventually... it only shows white (the screen equivalent of "winter")
If you try to type something on your keyboard when your computer is off, the bits accumulate in the cord (that's why the old keyboard cables were always coiled... the bits were bigger back then so the coiling resulted in more space for the bits to accumulate) and eventually if you keep typing over the years with your computer off (or if your cat walks on the keyboard even) the cord will fail, probably at the back of your PC and all the bits will flow out on the ground and so your password can be read by hackers with laser beams such as those found in your CD or DVD drive.
I can't count how many people have jobs running at their desks overnight or into the late evening...
you shut those babies off, you'll have 2.3B of easy headcount reduction in IT.
This is my sig.
I teach physics at a community college, and I recently made a big push to get proper power management set up in the science division's computer labs. It ended up being orders of magnitude more work than I thought it would.
I had seemed like a total no-brainer to me. We had 42 desktop Windows machines in our student computer labs. They were running 24/7. They had CRT monitors, and they were configured so that when they weren't being used, they ran a waving flag animation on the screen, meaning that both the CPU and the monitor were drawing full power. Here we were teaching our students about global warming, but we had this ridiculously wasteful configuration.
The first issue was that, as the slashdot summary suggests is common, nobody really cared, because it was some other part of the organization that was paying the electric bills.
The second issue was that when I approached IT, they wanted to handle it using software called Deep Freeze, which not only handles power management but also automatically restores the computer's hard disk to a known state every so often. This is in principle a good idea, because it means that students can't screw up the machines, and it's another layer of defense against malware. However, it opened up a whole can of worms, because if they were going to make this new hard disk image, they wanted to make sure it was done right. They wanted to update the OS, and install all the apps from scratch. Well, we had a ton of apps dating back to ca. 1995 that were still being used for instruction, but nobody could find the licenses for them. So that became a huge issue. It was one that we would have had to deal with sooner or later anyway, but it was a clear example where the easiest thing to do is always to leave things the way they are.
So we finally got that done, after much interpersonal conflict and hurt feelings. Now we have the new issue, which seems to be that Deep Freeze doesn't play nicely with Windows updates. In one lab, for example, we have about 60 machines, roughly half belonging to the science division. Their hard disks get reimaged over the weekend by Deep Freeze. But wait, then on Monday morning people walk into the lab and power up all the machines. Now all 60 machines phone home and realize that they need an update from MS; they had the update before, but it got erased by the reimaging. So they all start downloading the same 100 Mb update at once, with predictable effects. A chemistry teacher brings in a whole class to do work on the computers, and the computers are completely unusable. Oops, time to come up with a new lesson plan. Hope he's good at thinking on his feet.
Of course there's no reason in principle that all of these different issues had to be coupled together. E.g., Faronics, which sells Deep Freeze, has another product that only does power management, not reimaging. But the thing is, in real life you're dealing with complex systems and complex human organizations, and lots of well-intentioned changes can have unintended effects.
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This is precisely why I stopped bothering with power schemes for the network I manage: we don't pay for our power, and neither I personally nor my department stands to gain anything by the extra effort put forth to put that in place.
Machines have had wake on lan for at least a decade to some extent. The problem has been standardization and security.
I once had a mythtv slave server set to wake on schedule and via lan broadcast, but it was fragile as hell (and didn't always work).
Most ethernet drivers in windows have a field buried in their properties page to enable different types of WoL, but it doesn't always work if the computer doesn't shutdown just right.
Granted, most IT departments use one vendor to supply computers (and thus can take advantage of that in deployment) and so should be able to find at least one vendor to provide a solution to get it to work (since microsoft dropped the ball).
I've been through this with the couple of organizations that I do support for. Enabling automatic sleep mode makes the users think that the computer has "locked up" as it resumes from sleep mode (for all I know, it may have, I'm not there to witness it). They then restart the machine.
In most cases, the end users will tolerate having the monitor go to power save, and the couple of seconds it takes to wake up from that, but nothing more. The systems run at full bore 24/7. This also makes remote administration easier.
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There are many reasons why an IT Department might not elect, or have the ability, to power down or enable power management capabilities of computers. For example one of my environments is used 70-80% of the day and the only time I have to run updates and daily tasks is at night, which leave me almost an intangible window for powering down my machines. And I completely agree with those of you who said not to lay this on the IT Department b/c you are right. Often times we do not have the authority in our organizations to make that decision or our specific environment does not allow for any down time.
"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me." --Hunter S. Thompson
...if people at least learned to turn off their monitors and put their screensavers to 'blank screen', unlike several of my coworkers who leave their PCs on all night with the monitors on and the screensaver set to something 'cool' which taxes their CPU/GPU to the max.
-- the cake is a lie
Sounds a classic issue of people not doing anything because of "Not my Budget" syndrome. Basically it is either going to cost them in the short term for taking the short term, or cause budgeting to be cut. This is certainly a management issue, but one that needs to be negotiated to the advantage of everyone.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Isn't it a common practice in _all_ companies that every employee shuts down their workstation when they go home - unless they have a good reason?
Disclaimer: I have only worked in a small company.
my machines update, scan, and redundantly backup at night. They are NOT idle.
I work at a place that has its own Cogeneration Facility powered by landfill gas. This is a 3.2 MW generator and if we don't use all of the power, we can't sell it back to PG&E so it'll just go to waste.
Hence... I leave my desktop on all the time. No big deal.
Right?
At work we use to turn all our machines off at five when we left but had to stop because IT use the evenings to install updates and run virus scans when we go home.
The money wasted running PCs is nothing to the sums wasted on other things by business. You might as well retract the aerial on your SUV to save on running costs. Yes folks, a car analogy.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Looking at what runs on the desktops of nearly every company with an IT department (and yes, your company may be different--GOOD for you!), we're faced with Windows. And at the end of the day, Windows does power management very poorly. If it worked _exactly_ as advertised, then it would be an ugly and painful kludge of overlapping terms and areas of control. Is suspending a computer more like "standby" or "hibernate?" What if I choose standby in 5 minutes, but turn off hard drives in 15 minutes? Who wins? Also, is my computer idle if I have an application running on it for hours (or days) on end? Does Firefox get treated the same as a gcc job?
However, that's in an ideal fantasy world. In reality, it's much worse. Some computers work, some don't. Some work one day, but fail after a MS patch. Some let you choose hibernate but won't do it, some will go to sleep and never wake up again. Now before anyone jumps in with 'oddball hardware' and such, let me point out these two points:
1) I see this behaviour with XP SP3 on an off-the-shelf Dell laptop certified for (and shipped with) XP. I see it on HP desktops under the same conditions. It's not just fringe cases, it's the definition of mainstream business computers!
2) It doesn't MATTER what hardware I have! If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Microsoft hasn't been able to get this working well since 1995 (or earlier--did Win3.1 have power management stuff in it?). Even if Vista or Windows 7 get it right, it won't matter at this point because nobody is willing to bother with power management anymore. The pain has been too great for too long for us to let it into our psyche, and it's not likely to suddenly happen now.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
We've been explicitly told by our IT department NOT to turn off our PCs, so that they can run backups on them while we're not there. I suspect this is true at many companies. The best you can do is set up power management to automatically shut off the video and hard drive after a suitable idle period. I guess they don't trust "Wake On LAN" to wake the machine up for backups. It also makes it easier for IT to do an automated audit or inventory of what is on the LAN if none of them are ever turned off. With the dickless Sun workstations we used to have, the argument was made that wear and tear on the machines from power cycling them costs more than the energy savings from shutting them off when not in use.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
1. Every time you reboot, the machines go through virus scans, update checks, and a thousand other automated routines. If you've got old computers, say over 4 years old, the downtime in the morning when everyone first arrives is crippling. You can't automate anything during working hours
2. You can easily set up computers to put monitors on power-save and to spin down the drives and get most of the desired savings.
3. Some people are bricks about how to do orderly logouts and shutdowns, causing hung sessions and disk corruption. I'm lucky if they remember their passwords from one day to the next.
The bottom line is that I CAN'T, not won't, teach people proper use of a computer or proper deployment of hardware to maximize productivity. They want to do what they need to do to get paid and everything else is my problem. The fastest computers will always go to the bigwigs, not the busiest people.
Go ahead! Tell the suits that it's their problem to monitor and discipline people for improper computer use. I'm not saving the world anymore.
What's the need for "power management software"
Users have a finger.
The computer has a button.
How hard can it be to push the damn button?
My view is each dept. or user has the autonomy to run processes at night or not. Except when I need to push out software, they have the autonomy to control when their computers are off or on.
Occasionally I'll tell them to leave their computers on overnight.
Occasionally I'll tell them that I'll be powering off their computers or rebooting them overnight.
Otherwise, I respect their autonomy.
that the sky is indeed falling. Pardon me while I turn this off.
I've seen it mentioned in the comments but no solutions offered so here it is:
To avoid having your many Windows boxen saturate your internet connection when they're turned on at 8:00am and start downloading updates, install WSUS on your LAN. They'll still download updates but it will be local and quick and won't affect your internet bandwidth.
You may still have to deal with the annoyed user who is pissed that they had to reboot 15 minutes after turning on their PC though....
What about cheap power buttons? The companies who make these don't expect you to turn them on/off very often. I had to shut down a PowerEdge 750 the other day, and when I went to power it back on, the damn power button broke and fell inside the case. I had to stay an (extra) hour later to get the damn thing running again, and I'll bet that every time we have to shut it down, we'll have to open the case to turn it back on. I shut down an HP Proliant on the same night, and the 2003 Server startup hung on the infamous acpitabl.dat. That took another hour. I had run into that one about a year ago and had the fix saved in an email, but as that happened to be the mail server, it wasn't much help (it turned out to be an incompatibility with the KVM switch in that rack). I don't think their cost and ROI calculations include the pain and suffering of the IT staff. I'm not even in IT, but we no longer have a dedicated IT person, so various developers maintain the servers.
... then we'd power them off. But, undoubtably this would lead to helpdesk calls.
I have responded to "dead PC" calls when, in fact, the PC was not plugged in, monitor not turned on, etc. At one job, that was like 20% of the work load.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Simple, a device called Iboot. remote power device.
For almost 10 years, I never turn off my computer and I never had a hard drive fail on me. About 6 month ago, I started believing these energy saving crap and turned off my computer every night, now I have a dead hard drive. It died during a boot up.
I know from experience that, in the USAF at least, there is a technology lag WRT power savings. Too many old computers that won't wake-on-LAN, too many older servers that won't support Microsoft's SCCM (the new flavor of SMS). We are constantly dealing with computers not getting updated because they were powered off, making them more vulnerable than other computers on the network. And if PCs are put in "sleep" mode and will WOL, if the server isn't running SCCM, you can't send the WOL to wake them up before pushing patches.
It all comes down to this: you need to spend money to save money. The federal government mandated that all agencies use less energy, but they're all spending more than the savings to get there.
I think I missed something somewhere.
Most people does not need their dual core processor to work. why not just use power efficient machine such as eee box (around 20W), fit pc(around 10W)... I understand we are not going to to this in day and we will have to wait to renew the machine set. Those machine can run windows XP and can probably do whatever a classical user need.
An other solution would be to use multi-headed setup to share a computer between two people since most graphic card have two outputs. It works perfectly well at home under linux. However, I don't know if windows can do that.
I work for a hospital system, so by default we're 24/7. We could implement some power savings except for the fact that clinicians don't understand computers, so if the monitor is dark then as far as they're concerned the machine is broken. Add to that the fact that they often won't call in a problem or try to turn it on but rather walk to another machine, plus that non-IT folk are in charge of the system so we're here to make them happy and not vice versa, and I suspect all our machines will be 24/7 from here on out.
I believe it is right and proper for a sysadmin to hate the users. This has been the order of things since the time of the dinosaurs, and the way it should be. We can't all be the BOFH, but we can all try.
(Besides, if I didn't hate the users, what excuse would I have for keeping a bat under my desk to threaten the users with?)
Is energy really in a permanent crisis? When did that start? Still seems cheap as ever to me.
Vaguely related to the topic at hand, I'd like to set my kids' computers (desktop machines) to automatically suspend when not in use. Suspend/resume works perfectly, and I can manually tell them to suspend from the login screen, but I'd like to see if there's an easy way to get them to automatically suspend after a few minutes of idle time on the login screen.
I use timeoutd to limit their daily computer time, so they always log out when done (or get logged out automatically after whatever is left of their time is burned). If gdm would then suspend a few minutes later, I could save some bucks without having to try to get them to do it. It's hard enough getting them to turn lights off and shut the danged door.
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What is IT? Why should I care if IT can't power down PCs?
... Anything IT does result in little payback for IT. People only realize us when something bad happens.
I got my current job partly based on the energy savings calculator I created http://cleverwatt.com/calc.php and I work for one of the most enviromentally savvy organisations in the country and yet we still have arguments over the cost savings.
See the realise issue is that a lot of machines (Dell, I am looking at you here) even when in the off state, still draw up to 40 Watts, for doing nothing. We spent a few weeks evaluating them and basically its a joke. The cost savins with a certain version of dell is so small that it makes no real diff.
However if anyone really is interested, im more than happy to dispense advice!
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As somebody said, hibernation support sucks. And if you are in the boot of a chef department, you calculate the cost this way : 1 minute to shutdown, 2 to 3 to boot up with win xp and network drive. Now multiply by 200 worker, at a price of 60 per co worker. By multiply by what, 200-250 days ? You quickly see that the economy spoken about is not a real economy. it is actually a loss for the firm, until electricity price match that loss, nobody in its right mind and knowing how to make additions will CARE.
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Our group was recently informed "the simple act of shutting down PCs at night can save a company with 10,000 PCs over $260,000 a year". We kicked around the idea.
That's an alleged savings of $26/year/computer, or about $0.09/day.
Assuming it takes 10 minutes daily to turn a computer on, wait for boot, and fiddle with getting everything back up to where it was*, we're looking at something vaguely around $6.00 spent just to recover from "the simple act of shutting down [an employee's] PC at night".
So turning off the computer at night costs roughly 64 times as much as leaving the durn thing on.
(* - I've got 20 windows open right now, and half of them took considerable time to get to where they are now as I'm debugging something.)
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I really think that's just the kind of detail management would ignore when making a decision like this.
The annoying time it takes to reboot, and the annoying time a system takes to come out of hibernation are things users encounter day to day.
That's the reason why business are not interested, not because they have not considered those things and because they have some other lame reason, but because all of us real users have experienced the extreme suck of restarting a system with a good 30 minutes of waiting between the startup, the running of the startup script items (huge amount of time if you are in any large corp), connecting to network drives, and the time to restart various apps, not to mention the context loss of having all the windows not where you left them as a spatial cue to what you are doing next.
If I had to restart Windows every day on a system I was using, I'd feel like shooting myself. Life would just be too frustrating.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The less idle machines sitting around for the botnets and worms, the better.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I have read almost 170 comments and only few touch the core of the issue. Most suggest that the OS/HW/SW/compay policy or some such combination could address the issue.
The real issue is this outdated thing called "PC". While it may make sense to individuals to "Own" a "PC" what are the reasons for sizable businesses to still use a "Desktop PC"?
PC Makers (I worked for one), Microsoft all pushed too hard for PC's, and SUN, for all their genius, was/isn't capable of pushing the "Network is Computer". If SUN has any genius at all they would see how to turn this "Green" concern to their and environment's advantage.
Think of a NetBook (not hard drive, not even an OS) with firmware to do DHCP/BOOTP and gigantic server(s).
As side effect of NetBook you also minimize the ill effects of "Microsoft Ecosystem".
If the thing is unaware or doesn't run over network when the world is going Web 2.0 and cloudy and all, it belongs in a museum.
Cell carriers can and will benefit but are too greedy and myopic and they will continue to have a "data plan". So WLAN NetBook will probably take a long time to realize.
Tell them they are personally killing the planet when they complain about long login times.
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If you have an AMD PC with the AMD Processor drivers, or a modern Intel, then configure your PC's power management mode to be "Minimal power management." This is under control panel, display, screen saver, power.
When you do this, it turns on Processor Throttle (AC) ADAPTIVE. This means that your AMD or modern Intel will power down the fans and CPU. Your 2.6Ghz CPU may power down to 933Mhz while you are not doing anything.
Don't worry, it will still go up to 2.6Ghz if you do something.
How about offering this up as step 1 of power savings? powercfg allows you to set these things up during machine login scripts for machine values, and if you grant the proper rights to your users a user login script can modify these settings for user settings. Machine settings take effect when no one is signed on (If not set, it runs full open) and user settings take effect when a user is signed on, and is per user.
powercfg /query
It's funny, I work at a school where all the pcs shut off at 8:00 every night.
The major push to make it that way was provided for by the students.
That works great because Students have zero concern for time. They can sit there chatting while computers come back online.
Wait until they are at work and don't have all the time on earth to wait for a stupid PC to boot every day...
It's not saving the earth to make people grumpier. Emotional state is part of the environment too and affects your outlook on everything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I work in a datacenter with tens of thousands of servers and dozens of industrial AC units. Power consumption of the desktop PCs for the support and administrative staff are a drop in the bucket compared to our overall energy usage.
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Global warming is fraud.. however if they pay me the difference I'll shut down the work stations. No? then I could care less.
(Note for socialists here: responsibility makes people do good things, if I'm paying the bill I'll shut them down, if some anonymous ideological group like a corporation or government pays then I will waste.)
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
How much would be wasted every year waiting for those same machines to boot back up, relaunching applications and reopening documents so people can get back to work?
I stole this Sig
Sometimes you will succeed to put in the worker's mind that they need to shut down computers when leaving office. Then you'll notice you'll have a bunch of computers online and monitors turned off
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I have read the article, and the linked article (http://www.infoworld.com/d/green-it/when-pcs-dont-snooze-you-lose-634?source=fssr ).
I still have not found a definition of 'power down' or 'monitor'.
Power Down:
Do they refer, hit the power button and pull the plug, or use stand by and hibernate?
Monitor:
What kind of monitor? CRT, LCD, Plasma, etc.? Is the monitor powered down (see above) or in stand by/(Energy Star)power save-stand by?
I think part of the reason that the research has been discounted, is that the scientific method was not followed. If these questions are left vague, how can any results be accurate?
As a side question, FTA - "Powering down those systems can result in as much as $45 in energy savings per PC and $30 per monitor, per year, according to Energy Star. Just chew on that for a moment. That's $75 a year, times the number of PCs and monitors at your organization. Or you can take the more conservative figure of $25."
This leads to WTF?! Who is doing the math here?
...it was a constant fight to get users to leave their computers on overnight so they could pick up the automatic patches and updates.
We had a really bad virus infestation which I traced to a cleaner who would run round unplugging all the computers moments after I left at night so our anti-virus updates weren't being applied.
I run 5 mac labs and while I schedule my machines to start up and shut down everyday (off completely on weekends), I do NOT allow my machines to sleep for a very good reason. If I allow them to sleep, os x when used in a server and remote home folder environment (os x server) will tend to freak out when it wakes up especially if someone is still logged in. I've seen machines beachball for minutes before it finally figures out what is going on.
I am planning on not turning my machines off at all soon, this is because I am going to start running folding at home on all of my lab machines when they are idle. I figure the lack of off time is warranted by the fact that I am contributing to the scientific community.
Also, the school is going to start installing SW (bigfix http://www.bigfix.com/content/power-management) on machines that will allow them to track how and where power is used. Then they want to tweek settings so they can show how much power they have saved. What this means for me, is I need to waste as much power as I can during these trials so I can continue running machines how I want to and still show savings. Seems silly but those are the hoops i suppose.
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
From the article:
Were it not rendered hopelessly ambiguous by the incomprehensible shift between "IT" and "you" between the first and second sentences, this might be taken to imply that IT should shut down and start up my PC on some regular schedule. Well, I don't have no freakin' regular schedule! . The day my boss tells me, "sorry, but we want to save seventy-five bucks a year, so you're going to have to work 8 to 5 now" is the day I quit. (And that's exactly what I did the last time a boss told me that.)
Sure, I wouldn't mind turning my PC on when I get in to work and off when I leave. But if I do that, I will sit around for an unknown amount of time every morning waiting for the patches that IT pushed the night before. (They used to push patches during the day, forcing reboots while people were working. I rather emphatically pointed out to the IT manager that this was unprofessional. To my amazement, this actually worked.)
And at home, I have...leseee...4 or 5 PCs. I do image backups of them on different nights per week, so that if some beloved member of my family gets another malware infestation, I can simply reimage her disk (they're all women, those people at home). I tell them never, ever to shut down their PCs because it's bad when all the electrons leak out of the CPU.
So I'm sorry, but I'm just an "always on" kind of guy.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
You can't always power down over night. Not if you push updates -- nothing PO's a general (worked for the USAF) more than coming in and booting up his PC only to have SMS take it over to push updates.
This is a total travesty.
Hardware is ill-suited for this. We need real remote turn-on, not crummy WOL that only works when the moon is in certain phases.
The power supply companies have an 80+ program where they did some pretty significant efficiency improvements.
Why can't they figure out the whole power thing and just do it right?
And if you have to even touch your servers after you turn them on, you're not a very good sys admin. What happens when the power cycles and you are not there?
Your landlord might be interested if you proposed a sort of "performance contract" where if your company cuts consumption you get a meaningful share of the landlord's cost savings. This would basically be a side deal to the existing lease, and it shouldn't have a downside for either party. Use less, they share their savings with you; don't use less, no rebate and everyone's exactly where they started.
Your company might also start taking this into account if you wanted to go "carbon-neutral" for image reasons -- then you'd have to account for your kWH consumption and would have an incentive to reduce it as much as possible, so your costs for RECs or GHG offsets are reduced.
People will not even notice.
Save their sessions when they go home and turn off the computer.
Turn it back on remotely, 15 minutes before they show up for work in the morning.
When they get to work they don't even know that their computer has been off the entire time they have been gone.
Any excuses are just lame.
As we've had LCD monitors dying from capacitors exploding, I went to management and showed them how many thousands of dollars we could save each year, by simply requiring people to turn their monitors off at night - almost tripling the usable lifespan. And also extended the numbers to extra longevity in workstations, requiring them to be powered down.
In about ten minutes, I was told "Great. Let's make this a policy." Usually, management loves to save money.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I always put my pc in standby mode, even when going away for short periods. I'm not quite sure how much it actually saves, but if you configure the right bios settings it'll even switch off the fans, so it seems like it's completely powered down
It takes a minimum of 20 minutes from when I press the power button on my work PC to when I am able to do any work. That translates to at least $13 of lost productivity for every time I turn my PC off for the night.
I'm pretty sure, my employer isn't stupid to allow me to waste 25 cents a night leaving it on.
Instead of shutting machines down, just measure when they're on. Anyone whose machine is still on outside business hours, dock their pay by some small amount to cover the wasted power and AC.
Better yet, monitor the entire cube (or office), not just the computer.
The first time some manager gets "slammed" with a few dollars docked from their salary, honestly, the manager is likely well enough paid that they don't care. If the problem is people working overtime, pay them enough overtime to compensate.
Is there an obvious reason this would fail, if actually implemented?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I find that the time my computer takes to boot is exactly equivalent to the time it takes for me to go get a cup of coffee.
Multitask, people!
Law firms are special cases. Lawyers work 18 hrs/day and can't afford to be bothered with slow computers running updates. IT has to stay late or come in at odd hours just to get any patching done. Patching and security audits are absolutely essential because of the nature of the industry. I've seen lawyers keep the same, unsaved document open on their desktop for weeks at a time, waiting for le mot juste, a BSOD, or a filing deadline, whichever comes first. A law firm is one of the most challenging environments for desktop support.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It seems like a rather obvious security measure to me, first and foremost. While it has been awhile since I've done a serious network hacking, wouldn't it be a logical failsafe measure to have as many PCs powered down as possible, should any firewall server breach ever occur????
5 minutes? Who turns computers off?
I have no fucking clue what kind of power saving mode my modern computer goes into, but I do know that when it falls asleep it is deader than a doornail but manages to wake up in under 15 seconds. I dont even mange it and I have no clue when or how it decides to fall asleep. It just does... power saving on modern computers is virtually a solved problem*.
* until you factor in remote access. WOL? Yeah right... never had that work right.
that modern PCs aren't able to go into a 2 watts mode that still listens to signals from keyboard, mouse, remote connections from the network etc. to wake it up.
Wake On LAN is too esoteric. Stand by (or suspend or hibernate) works great, but is not seamlessly able to just wake up when I do a remote connection or move the mouse.
Frankly, a computer doing nothing than just idling in Windows (or Linux, or...) shouldn't use more than a couple of watts.
Problem solved.
My morning routine:
Work (and perhaps nibble while doing so).
You want to talk about savings to a company, lets talk about every person in the company waiting for a PC to boot. Not everyone gets coffee/tea. You also discounted all the time when you got back to work, that you are restarting apps and positioning windows.... again multiply that by each and every person, are you really saving money or have you just lost a shitload of manhours down the hole never to be seen again?
If a company could power off PC's at night, and have them ready by the time you returned with apps opened and positioned just as you left them - then I could see it saving money. Otherwise it's at best a loss and likely a wash (given as I said a more realistic 15-30 minute startup time including scripts and relaunches).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ours are in use 24/7 except when a user screws up and locks their desktop out of the compute pool. We're mostly a linux shop. I suppose a couple of the Windows servers could sleep, but (a) we don't trust it, (b) people log in at all sorts of odd hours to do things and (c) backups and other things run during off hours. So sleeping just isn't an option for our systems.
I realize this doesn't apply to everyone, but the situation isn't black and white.
Why don't you use a timed setup where the computer turns on 30 minutes before you show up in the morning?
I'm glad your life is so predictable you can do that. Mine never was, even in a large company.
These days I just close a laptop even if I need to go to the rest room. Problem solved, laptops are naturally power conserving and take to suspension well.
As for larger companies implementing the plan, that would be great if it worked. Since I've yet to hear of a large company doing this, I have to think there are some hidden issues making it more complex than it seems (like different times for everyone, and needing to have people set them somehow - now a ten person project with scope of a year in any large corp).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Woah woah woah - I wouldn't say they're unused. If you started powering down your PCs at night it will severely impact the effectiveness of my zombie network.
or else!
I find my productivity improves when I sit down at my workstation and have everything already open and ready to use: My code editor, my code runtime, any models, spreadsheets, and reference resources that I have open. Normally, I would just Hibernate at the end of the day, and restart in the morning.
However, a key portion of my work environment requires a license from a license server; if I am offline, I lose the license, and nearly everything I have been working on dies irretrievably. If it took me only 5 minutes to get situated in the morning, that's 25 hours of my time wasted setting up my work environment over the course of a year. 25 hours of most professionals' salaries (at places that are large enough that computed power is a notable expense) is more than the savings in power.
Then there's the extra issue that I can't remotely access my machine on the weekend or some morning if necessary... but the main one for me is keeping my work environment set up.
So that is 1-4 employees. Now, if you had one more experienced person, you can afford to take time to do things *PROPERLY*.
Which frees up time later, so you can do MORE things properly.
If you actually FINISH your work, then you can have the system boot up and restore the previous session, where all the windows will be open.
And do ALL 10,000 PC users have the same issue? No? Then that's 1/4 million because of YOU. It would save a shedload to sack your sorry ass.
every machine had a linux partition with its own windows disk image in a big file on that partition.
i could use any amchine to build a new image, then blast it out (with udpcast) to all other machines in about 1/2 hour.. reboot them all and youre done.
had my own python interface that would pop up on boot, an untrained person could reimage the whole lab quite easily.
turn the damn updates off. you update a single machine when nobody is around, then deploy that image. no muss no fuss.
nobody who i worked with understood what i was doing, and they never hired me for a full time job. probably because i said we should form a union, i dont know.
students loved me though, thats all that matters.. right?
According to Cassatt's director of product management Ken Oestreich, powering down servers can be a safe, viable activity. Moreover, the company practices what it preaches. "We've got several hundred servers here that we're power managing that are turned on and off several times a day. We've had no failures for three or four years," he said.
Okay, you've got several hundred servers and had no failures in 3 or 4 years. I'm calling bullshit on this one.
Otherwise I want to know what exactly you are running, because I have never heard of this type of reliability.
A number of places I know of just replace 1/3 of their systems out of service every 3 years and they still have failures.
I'm sure our uptime could be increased by increasing the quality of our parts. But the latest quote I received indicated that increasing the quality was going to cost us about $200 to $250 per system.
And spending extra money across the board isn't going to solve all our issues, even the top vendors have bad lots.
So I like another poster would like to see hard evidence from a trusted source (Dell and HP saying its so, isn't going to cut it. I think their results have a tinge of conflict of interest).
But based on my experience, I have seen computers constantly running in the on state for 5 years. Whereas I see computers not on UPS systems, just surge protection, failing after every power outage.
My other experience within Manufacturing where we shutdown systems when not in use, we found that our uptime increased by 30% on equipment that was constantly in use. (Not computers, but systems with a large number of electronic parts and computer controllers).
So I would like to see better evidence, from sources other than the ones who are selling computers and those that are trying to sell me software to shut down my computers.
No. I am guilty. But not that reason.
I continuously try to find a low power cpu. using less limited on time. But it is just the boot time is very very long. And the sleep mode very very unrealiable.
Until they make os completely different. Making only the minimal in boot time. And use startup scripts to start process when needed. Allow process to die without affect hardware.
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school. I left after 3 years, due to an incompetent, Michael Scott-esque principal who thought my job was to make all the faculty "happy", making my job a living hell. I now sit back in the private sector and watch the school district scramble to make massive budget cuts.
The school district policy was to keep all computers on 24*7. For security reasons, they disabled the magic packet on all switches, so I couldn't even do power-via-LAN if I wanted to.
All the computers in my school fetched updates from the district's WSUS daily at 0300.
If I were still there and allowed to, it would be simple: have all computers in the school shut off at 1800 [unless being used] and on at 0600. If it's WSUS night, on at 0200. Similar provisions would be made for McAfee updates. For all two faculty and myself who did the VPN/RDP thing from home, I'd be happy to make an exception for them and allow their workstations to be on 24*7.
The only problem? The evening janitors would probably get spooked by hundreds of computers all "turning themselves on" at the same time. :-)
I did what I could, though. I used HP Web Jetadmin to make sure all 100 or so network laser printers in the school went to sleep after 15 minutes of idle.
No good deed goes unpunished. The guidance secretary could NOT accept waiting 30 seconds for a LaserJet 9000 to warm up a few times a day, so I set the damn thing to warm up at 0600 and sleep after 4 hours, ensuring it would stay warm all day. There go a few hundred dollars a year.
Did I want to do that? Of course not. It was, however, the lesser of two evils. If I claimed I "couldn't" adjust the sleep time, the guidance secretary would have opened an office supply catalog, bought a $39 HP DeskJet, and I'd spend the rest of the year explaining why a $39 printer sucks.
You're right and you're wrong.
The house/senate votes on how much money to give you every year. You're expected to make it last and find interesting ways to use it. Where the system broke down is that you blew the money on training. A trick used by people I know who work for the state: keep a "cristmas list" of things you need/want to buy but there's no money. Every time a surplus comes up then you're ready: "I know just what we need to buy... this, this, and this" as you rattle of the list from memory during the meeting. If you're smart about this, you can keep ahead of the future and build your department up with nice gear, tools, a DVD duplication tower, laptop battery charging station, good servers, etc.
If you every find yourself in that position again, be ready with a list "things we need and why we need them" so you'll be ready. Basically, the system fails when you/others fail to take advantage of it.
It turns them all on at 2:55am unfrozen, windows update runs at 3am (with the auto-install) also symantec anti-virus runs, and at 4am it refreezes the machines and shuts them back down.
What happens during the DST change overs, when the time jumps from 02:00 straight to 03:00?
We do power off our PCs at night where I work, and I could write you a short book on reasons NOT to do so. There are assorted technical reasons, and there are some fairly compelling security reasons (especially if you use Microsoft Windows, which is a fairly common scenario), but most of all there are social reasons.
Technical reasons? Where to begin? How about with "the shut-down interface changes slightly with every revision of Windows (in some cases even for service packs, e.g., XP SP2 changed it) *and* is different for Windows systems that are joined to a Windows domain versus ones that aren't, so there's more staff training than you really want to put into something as non-mission-related as turning the PCs off at night. If you have staff who are actually comfortable with computers and use them at home, you probably haven't even noticed this. I can hear you now, saying exactly what I would have said before I started working with end users: "What do you mean, it changed, it's been the same since 1996." But you're thinking in higher-level terms, like a person who *understands* the interface, so you probably think shutting down Windows is two steps (Start->Shut Down, and click the yeah-shut-down button). But end users don't think that way. Breaking it down the way they see the computer interface, performing this task is about eight steps, too many to easily remember. Some of them have it written down on a half-sheet of paper taped up somewhere near the PC, I kid you not. It goes something like this (depending on what version of Windows they have): To turn off the computer: 1. move the mouse to the lower-left corner where it says Start. 2. Click with the left button and let up. If nothing happens[note 1], click the left button again until it does. 3. When the thing comes up, move the mouse to the red button. 5. Click the left button again. If nothing happens, keep clicking the left button until something does happen. 6. Move the mouse until the arrow points to the OK button. 7. Click the left button again. If nothing happens, keep clicking the left button until something does happen. 8. Wait until the screen goes dark. 9. Turn off the power bar.
Now, if you carefully compare several different versions of Windows, you will discover that steps 3 and 6 on that list have changed with almost every version. And if you join the computer to a domain and then unjoin it, you'll discover that some of the steps appear, disappear, or change. We have computers on a Windows domain on one subnet, and other computers that aren't on one, and the same people are turning both kinds off at night, so users have to keep straight at least two shutdown styles, even if we *did* keep everything on the same version of Windows. Bonus.
Plus, of course, it's not economically feasible for an organization our size to keep everything on the same version. That would mean replacing all the hardware every time Microsoft decides to do a new release, and that would mean we'd have to spend about ten times our whole computer budget just on replacement workstation hardware. So we actually have three or four shutdown styles at any given time, and the number has only gotten that small recently since we've phased out all the legacy systems.
Don't look at me like that. I'm serious, we just got rid of the last Windows 98 system about a year ago, and the last MacOS 9 system about a year before that. The Linux systems all do shutdown -h on a cron job, though, so they don't have to learn the Gnome and KDE shutdown interfaces, which is a nice break. (Now, if somebody tells me about an easy way to make standard Windows workstations turn themselves off automatically without user intervention at set times each day of the week, I'll simultaneously want to jump for joy and also smack my head against the wall for not finding out sooner.)
Let's see, that's one technical reason I've discussed so far, right?
In the interest of brevity, I'll jump to chapter two, security reasons. Two words: Automat
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Assuming it takes 10 minutes daily to turn a computer on, wait for boot, and fiddle with getting everything back up to where it was*, we're looking at something vaguely around $6.00 spent just to recover from "the simple act of shutting down [an employee's] PC at night".
Hibernate the machine and it will keep everything as it was when you locked the screen, but still not use (as much) power.
Can't you configure it to automatically power on at a certain time? Say thirty minutes before you usually get into the office. I know there's such a setting on my Mac, but it's using EFI and not a standard BIOS. Certain Dell models can do this, so I'm assuming other PCs can as well:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/dta/enhancem/00000031.htm#Auto%20Power%20On
That's true, but it's not the only reason IT isn't powering them down. We've talked about it in my group, but it makes a lot more sense to leave them on for two reasons: updates and boot times. Updates because if computers are left on and locked (which a fair number of people do) then they can grab SMS and Windows updates. Boot times because a lot of people come in in a hurry to get into outlook to figure out where their meeting is and don't want to wait 7 or 8 minutes for the machine to boot up and open Outlook.
Also, considering I work in IT for a factory, we wouldn't save much power anyway. Most of our PCs are shared across all three shifts, so they get used around the clock. People feel pretty free to use any PC, even those in the office cubicle areas, so unless you have a locked office door the PC is probably getting used even at night.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
IT and management ignore the issue because they know users leave they're machines on and locked most of the time so they can quickly get logged back in. The company I work for gives people no time to get logged. It's sign in and start working or else they consider you late.
A simple way to change this is to pass a law saying that employees have to be allowed 10 minutes to boot and log into their PCs at the start of their shift. It would force companies to schedule people to overlap and look for other ways to save money like on electricty by powering down PCs when not in use.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Have you tried a Mac lately? Since 2005 and the PowerPC Mac Mini I have been amazed at how power management via sleep/wake works on a mac. Even with the bluetooth keyboard and mouse my MacMini would sleep taking only 2 watts of power and it would wake in less than 5 seconds with a fully functional wireless network connection. My 2006 macbook had the same predictable and usable results as well as my 2008 macbook. All of my Mac computers I have put different hard dives and non apple ram and they still work great.
In fact I chuckle each time I see a Windows user shutting down a laptop when at the airport, because with my mac I just close the lid and it goes to sleep and stays sleeping till I take it out and open it up.
No software or drivers have stopped the mac from working right. The Dell windows machines at work may have issues with software or drivers...
Your Average Joe
Is there an obvious reason this would fail, if actually implemented?
For one, it might actually be illegal to dock pay off of salaried workers. Even if it weren't, HR would raise hell being saddled with yet another variable in their paycheque calculations.
For two, good luck getting people to sign this revision to their contract.
For three, even if they signed, prepare for a bitchfest when they're docked pay.
At our office we actually do shut down most of the workstations overnight, and I'm all for at least hibernating them at larger companies. But I think the implementation headaches and animosity your particular suggestion would cause, would far outweigh the $75/person/year, even for a large organization.
I have found the benefits of trying to do power saving are quickly outweighed by the hassle the first time you get a call from the VP about why "his damned computer will not come on". After gently explaining it was due to the new hibernation settings that administration had requested be put on ALL PC's, I then asked it if would "be ok" for me to switch his back to a compromise of 20 min display sleep, and 90 min computer sleep. "Most" of the time, hibernation would be "ok", but he finally had it bite him one too many times on recovery. Everyone else had to grin and bear the hibernation oddities that would pop up, but when it happened to one of the main guys pushing for knee-jerk "power savings", it became "an issue". We have not had any complaints since. Admin gets the bragging rights of saying they "implemented power savings measures" and we get to avoid most of the hassles of stricter measures. It is still requested that people power off their displays at the end of the day, but the less strict policies appease admin and still offer some power savings without causing us issues. Hibernation (or deep sleep) is just junk when it comes to older hardware; or god help you... notebooks AND docks. The newer the notebook/dock combo, the better it works. Your mileage may vary, but older tech and hibernation/deep sleep just is a bad mix.
...once and was told that they preferred that we didn't turn off our PCs (just the monitors) since it let them push patches out to all the desktops at night. Otherwise patches got pushed out during the day prompting numerous complaints about the PC's sluggish performance ("The hard disk LED isn't blinking, it's just on") when they tried that in the past. I was one of the dwindling number of folks that actually had desktop systems (as opposed to a laptop) so I guess they didn't think the energy waste was as large as it could have been. At least us desktop system users weren't going to be calling and complaining about the nastygrams that would pop up on an almost weekly basis (usually when you could least afford the downtime) when patches for one application after another were being pushed out to the folks that had been issued laptops. (They'd even push patches out to laptops when users were connecting to the corporate network after hours; even the poor slobs who were dialing in.)
Of course, having a Linux system on my desk made the occasional loss of the Windows system much easier to deal with. (I considered the XP system my secondary system, anyway; only good for reading email, reviewing the occasional spreadsheet, and looking at internal web pages that required IE and nothing but IE (ugh!).) And when the Linux box was left on (with the monitor off, of course), it was doing useful work going out collecting data each night from a slew of other systems and populating a database so I could have information to reference when co-workers and managers called with questions about those systems.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
IT is overhead. When you can lower the costs of overhead, that's good in business. If IT has needs that aren't being met, IT can make a real BUSINESS case that the saved power money needs to go to X Project, and if Y Project in another department is not a HIGHER PRIORITY for the BUSINESS, then great. Not sure what the whining at the end of the article is about.
+++OK ATH
You'd need to, to get the key to my office to do so. Ordinarily, that wouldn't have been an issue, but for the fact that the engineering simulations I had to run needed to process overnight, what with the lack of an office supercomputer and all. At first, I thought it was just bad luck that my default desktop was showing - that somehow, the simulator had crashed and dumped to the desktop. That is, until I noticed the correlation between this event and the fact that my carpet was clean and trash emptied every time. Now, with the door securely closed and locked, I don't have to worry about losing work, but I do have to clean my own goddamned office. If shutdowns were IT policy, common sense would dictate that there would be some sort of user consultation first - ergo, heed my warning and lock your offices now.
Mine stays running 24x7 because I need to be able to access it when I'm at home.
I'd rather other people left their workstations on overnight as well, at least once a week; the scheduled virus scan is set to run overnight and the WOL option never seems to work. The only other option is to set the task to re-run if missed, which means it will run the next time the machine is booted; that results in people complaining about it slowing their machine down.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
I remember reading some study that basically said the power savings from shutting down computers was insignifigant compared to the power required to make all the replacement parts needed by a computer that was started up/shut down every day.
A cold start is rough on moving parts, fans and hard drives. Hard drives fail, fans fail and CPUs melt, etc etc.
Theres no COST savings in lowered electricity use compared to having to replace hardware AND (IIRC according to the study i cant find that i wish i could cite...) theres no actual energy savings either when factoring in the manufacturing of replacement parts either.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Whats wrong with stating that Monday nights is skipped from the power off demand, and its power-off every other night. Thus, on Monday nights, the system updates could be scheduled. That change would provide 6/7th of the anticipated savings.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"Have you tried a Mac lately?"
Stop right there. Fanboys are cute, and on a good day I'd be tempted to pat you on the head and say, "that's nice, now run along and play. Grown ups are talking."
Today isn't a good day. Therefore...
Congratulations. You apparently missed the entire point of (a) what I said, and (b) the article itself. You have shown strong evidence of an inability to understand and think critically, suggesting that Mac users really _are_ a cult.
It's not about how MacOS behaves. It's not about how Linux behaves (or god forbid, Ubuntu "Vomiting Vole" version 63.1.2.7b patch 14) or Solaris, or FreeBSD or AIX or VMS.
Read the headline: "Why IT won't power down the PCs."
Read the summary: "...top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management"
Read my post: "Looking at what runs on the desktops of nearly every company with an IT department (and yes, your company may be different--GOOD for you!), we're faced with Windows."
The fact that works better than Windows is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to the issue! I thought the comment about "your company may be different..." would be clear enough for most people, but apparently not you.
Again, congratulations on missing the blindingly obvious. Our company could hire you--you'd fit in well.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There is no reason why the power saving policies have to be one-size fits all and without exceptions.
If IT sends out the WOL packets about 15 minutes before work starts, they can just let users know that if they DO choose to shut their system down when they go home, it will be ready for them in teh A.M. Some people saving power beats nobody saving power.
If updates and such need to run, send the WOL packets in time for that to complete before work starts and enjoy the savings from a few hours powered off. That should still manage 10 hours a day or so.
WOL packets can work when sent from a VPN connection if they're allowed to. There's no need for all of those machines to be on 24/7 "just in case". If someone needs to VPN in after hours to access their desktop, they can easily enough wake their machine up.
As for software costs, that's just silly. There are many free programs that can send a WOL packet. It's not as if a commercial program is going to send a "higher quality" WOL packet. If the company has no Unix machines to run a free script on with a decent cron utility, there's always cygwin.
Man, they let you keep a bat?
The best I could get approved is about three feet of leftover dell server packaging (think nerf foam) which is lovingly referred to as "The IT Hammer".
The real difference is probably that I actually hit people with the hammer, and you probably have to leave the bat under your desk while you wait for the final breakdown...
What IT managers that are indifferent on the matter need to think about is that although much of the energy cost flow to some other department, it could end up being their paycheck along with others, that gets cut because they spent too much money or energy even out of some other departments budget. Helping the organism overall is better than just trying to save brain. What good are you if you have a great heart or a great brain but everything else is toast.
jonadab,
Thanks for taking the time to compose all this, I think you point out some interesting situations. I would like to suggest a few things that may help out, although they all have their drawbacks so you might have already dismissed them.
Win xp comes with the shutdown.exe program which can be used both locally by the user (A shortcut on the desktop to shut down the machine) or via the task scheduler to shut down at a certain time, or remotely to shutdown other machines that can be reached and authenticated to on the network.
For your users that have trouble with the steps to shut down a computer, you could setup a shortcut that they would just need to double click to start the shutdown process. It sounds like they still might have trouble with double clicking, so maybe you could teach them to click once and then hit enter.
It sounds like you already script shutdowns for linux machines, so you could also try setting up scheduled tasks to shut down on a regular schedule. I don't really like this method because if a user leaves something open that they didn't save, and the force shutdown method is used, they may loose work. You could use the not forced shutdown method, but users might get confused the next day when they need to deal with all sorts of "Close this program?" dialogs, along with needing to restart the machine when they get in, although I think the restart can be canceled at that point.
Both of the options I mentioned so far require that changes be made to each machine. If you use the remote shutdown features you could potentially setup the scheduled shutdown on one of your servers. It depends on how your user accounts/authentication is setup though. By default windows only allows administrators to remotely shut down a machine, but that can be changed via gpedit.msc. ( Computer Config - Windows Settings - Security Settings - Local Policies - User Rights - Force shutdown from a remote system)
I would take out the step of turning off the power bar, unless there is really a good reason for it. If you did that then you could use WOL to start machines in the morning. Just start them all 30 minutes before someone normally comes in. Also, many newer bios versions have the ability to just setup a regularly scheduled start time, but that takes setting it up on each machine again, unless you use dell openmanage or something equivalent that lets you manage bios settings for all your machines.
The thing that I like about WOL is that anyone can run it. If you have one staff member that gets in early, just add a little WOL script to his computers startup folder, every time he starts his machine, he can start up all the machines in his department. When there is a holiday, he won't be in, so the machines won't get started. Of course, if he is sick, the machines won't get started, but this is just an example.
You should look into use WSUS to manage your windows updates. It sounds like you just have each machine set to download updates from MS and install them. If you used WSUS you could choose when to install updates for the entire organization, or for departments in the org.
Consider this scenario - Patch Tuesday comes around. You approve the updates to a few machines just to test them out. If nothing bad happens to those machines in the next week you approve the updates for all your machines at 9am on Thursday morning. During the day all the machines check in, see that there are updates and download them. You have all the machines set to install updates at 7am on Friday. At 6:45am on fri, you do a system wide WOL, which wakes up all the machines, they install windows updates and reboot and are ready to go for staff that come in at 8am. (The 6:45 time is also a good spot to schedule virus def updates. Adjust the time to fit your bandwidth and machine speed. Maybe it needs to be 4am)
In a not AD environment, setting the windows updates settings takes running gpedit.msc and setting some values on each machine, so again it wil