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."

Comments

I just don't get it

[York the Mysterious]

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.

Re:You don't say..?

[MyLongNickName]

Depends on perspective, I guess. Since we are an IT board, I think it is good to point this out as an IT problem. If this were a management board, then the question would be how do you properly set up your budgets to hold folks accountable for the areas they should be held accountable for. I know in most organizations, an IT department could institute a power savings plan get no credit for the savings but be responsible for any expenses (new software) to help implement it. And if anything went wrong, some poor IT manager would be left hanging. Can you truly blame the manager for not wanting to stick his neck out for no reward?

Re:IT is a customer service group

[iamhigh]

WHOA, Whoa, whoa... You have SMS and wake on lan enabled and working and you can't get a simple batch file to remotely shut down the computers? Something is wrong with that; shutting down the computer is the EASY part.

First google result: http://www.astahost.com/info.php/shut-down-restart-log-off-xp-using-batch-file_t3715.html

Re:IT is a customer service group

[BitZtream]

I see your problem. You think managers are logical and considerate. You are wrong, sadly.

I worked for the state of Georgia a few years back, during my time there our group cut our districts IT costs essentially in half, not my doing or anything but it happened either way.

At the end of the year we had a large amount of cash left over in our budget because of the ways we came up with to save during the year.

You know what happened? We spent almost every dime we had left over doing stupid training for things we were perfectly qualified to manage already because our next years budget would be based on what we spent the previous year.

So ... rather than doing our jobs well and being rewarded by getting a little more consideration when we actually NEEDED the money in the future, we had to waste it to ensure that we'd get the funds next time around, even though we knew we wouldn't need them unless something unforeseen happened or that we'd need the money in a couple years when the next round of upgrades/replacement needed to occur. You simply can't budget properly in that state because once you've given some money back, getting an increase later is next to impossible, you have to ramp up over several years in order to get some extra for upgrades/replacements of major systems.

It was worse than just that however, not only did we have a surplus that we wasted, we had other groups in our district that had surpluses as well, which rather than losing the funding the following year they would figure out ways to funnel the money to us (legitimately) so we could spend it on new equipment to justify their budget.

The other groups had extra money because they would get grants and federal funding to do projects, but the funding wouldn't be around the following year, so to continue those public health projects in the future, they really needed to keep their allotment for the next year high enough to pay for everthing.

I write this comment and still think it was absolutely retarded, but those poor bastards that were actually doing the work couldn't do 'the right thing' because it would only screw them within a couple of years because managers and politicians up stream are so broken and stupid that they reward wastefulness and punish efficiency.

There really is no reason that your typical government worker wants to be efficient, they just get punished for it later. Try to remember that next time you go to the health department, DMV or whatever government office and you see them doing something that seems like a complete and utter waste of resources. They probably are fully aware of it, but have to do it anyway so they don't get fucked later and end up with too little money and some stupid politician asking them why they ran out.

Re:IT is a customer service group

[QuantumRiff]

To reply to my own post.. two other things to work around..

- If you can turn off all PC's, you can turn them all on. Force all machines on at 2am via WoL, check for updates, and shut off when done. Its actually pretty easy to setup.

- Use that same WOL tool to turn on all computers at 7:45 or a bit earlier, so that the virus scan updates, and general booting of the services, is done before the people log in a few minutes before 8am..