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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
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?
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
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.
Nerd Rock In Progress
I think you mean
Internal politics and poor leadership in [almost every business] are the cause of almost every single problem in [almost every business].
From GM to AIG, from the US Senate to the government of Zimbabwa; that statement works for almost everything.
To save that $75 worth of electricity ...
Or, to save half, disallow installing software that sits there and uses 100% of your available CPU time.
Whale
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.
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?
Where are you that savings to facilities means a savings to IT? Individual departments have their own budgets and little managers guard their little fiefdoms as much as they can. A savings of power would show up under what ever department is in control of the power.
In short, in many companies IT would be doing a whole lot of work so the Facilities manager can get a raise. Hell, IT might even get reprimanded for creating busy work for itself instead of focusing on core deliverables or some other bullshit.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Something has to be missing from your reason. While people are dumb, why would someone have a need to advertise to their own employees at night when there isn't any employees? During the day the PCs would be running and the screen saver could advertise - but at 3 AM when pretty much nobody is around (or maybe a skeleton crew)? This just doesn't jive - and in all honesty as head of a department you should have presented common sense facts to the person in marketing or their boss.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
When WOL works, it's amazing, when it doesn't, it's amazing ly full of suck.
I had my media center set to sleep after an hour, until I found out that the extender won't wake it up. (Way to go linksys). Current system throttles down, goes into away mode, but can't quite make that last step to sleep, at least it's a start.
Recent studies have shown that people waste approximately 20% of their time in the office just screwing around.
They should allocate 5% of that 20% to people sneaking around, turning off other people's computer when they aren't looking in order to save on power.
Then you can allocate another 5% to turning the computer back on and waiting for it to boot, once an employee returns from the bathroom and discovers his computer has been shut down by a co-worker.
That still leaves 10% screwing around time - with no productivity lost and enormous power savings!
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
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.
I hate to say this, but wouldn't it make much more sense to connect directly to the servers in question using SSH or a thin client solution like Terminal Server? Unless there aren't public, which I suppose they technically are if you can connect from home either way.
I say this because the servers have to up no matter what, and if you simply using your work desktop to connect to them, then why not just skip the desktop and connect directly to the server?
Unless your company has a policy against using non-work machines to connect to the servers... Which technically you are anyways by proxy...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Marketing doesn't listen to or obey reason, logic or sense. They are fundamentall opposing concepts.
None of these computers were in client facing positions, so effectively, they were insistent on wasting energy to advertise....to empty chairs at 4AM!
Fixed that for you.
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?)
You need to beat your incompetent IT department. If they're using Deep Freeze, the FIRST thing you should do is turn off the automatic updates. Update the "root" image and push it when you need to, monthly or whatever. But having it hit the network like you say is nothing but incompetence.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
There's no such thing as "100% efficiency conversion to heat". It's a meaningless sentence. What you're calling 100% efficient heating is actually 0% efficient machinery. It does no useful work, not even useful computation.
If you need the heating, get a heat pump. You'll use fewer VAs to bring more Ws into the room. Using computers as electric resistance heating elements is dumb. Using electric resistance heating elements itself is pretty dumb, unless you're using them to maintain a precise temperature as part of a larger system, but you can't use computers in this way because you can't vary the waste heat on demand.
Even if you use gas heat, you'll save more money on your gas bill by just getting a programmable thermostat to start the warm-up early enough to be comfortable when people arrive.
The less idle machines sitting around for the botnets and worms, the better.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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
My MacBook sleeps when I don't touch it for 15 minutes. The time to wake it up and start working is a few seconds plus the time it takes to type my password.
I agree with the parent, my time is more valuable than the time spent fiddling with my computer every morning. Better hardware and software support at the OS level with a sleep policy after a certain time is probably the best compromise.
Despite calculating that the organization could save $75K annually (this was a conservative estimate), their marketing department put a stop to the idea.
With 4000 employees, even a $200K savings per year would work out to only $50/employee. With an average salary of $25K (hopefully low), if the PC shutoff plan did something that wasted 4 hours of employee time per year (like taking as little as 1 minute to start up in the morning), then it's not worth it to the company.
Until you can save the equivalent of at least 2000 hours per year of salary per employee, it's probably not guaranteed to be a money saver for the company. My WAG is that at about 500 hours/year you'd be able to persuade accountants that it might be worth it.
We're moving to a thin client / published desktop environment via Citrix. I frequently run into the same thing you're talking about - my solution? Just power off my thin client (or kill my Citrix session if I am ica'ing from a remote locale via a PC). It suspends the session and I just come back to it the next day.
;)
That works great until it doesn't.
Illiterate? Write for free help!
I guess you don't know about the 'Save this session' option.
I don't use windows so I don't know how it works but I'm doubtful that it saves the state of the RAM and I'm sure it still takes a while to start up.
I don't know how the numbers balance out but I think it's important to remember that electricity isn't the only cost to consider.
I stole this Sig
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.