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Why IT Won't Power Down PCs

Posted by timothy on from the sheer-cussedness dept.

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."

22 of 576 comments (clear)

  1. IT is a customer service group by winkydink · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:IT is a customer service group by julesh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Good point.

      Also worth considering is that if IT departments aren't introducing it because they're scared of losing budget flexibility, then this is a failure of the top level budgetting process. If I, as megacorp's IT director, introduce measures that save £2 million per annum off megacorp's energy bill, I should expect a little more flexibility in a couple of months time when I go to the board asking for extra cash for hardware upgrades. It sounds like this isn't happening.

    2. Re:IT is a customer service group by eln · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Additionally, if IT goes around imposing such a policy without the business asking for it, they'll open up a huge hornets' nest. The IT department can suggest it as a way for the business to save money, and maybe some IT departments have been lax in not doing so, but without the business actually telling them to do it IT is not going to. In fact, the business would be pretty pissed off if they did.

    3. Re:IT is a customer service group by Maclir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So, IT Departments aren't meant to be proactive and show initiative, and make the company more profitable?

    4. Re:IT is a customer service group by Kizeh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This, in fact, is one of the reasons why, when we explored this idea, it was rejected from the get go. That and jobs, reports etc. that run automatically, defragging that happens at night, patch updates that may take a long time, backups, and the erratic work schedules of academians in general.

    5. Re:IT is a customer service group by sam991 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Evidently he has a laptop and VPN access and company policy should be that all important documents are held on central storage, not a user's PC. Important apps can be published via Citrix and run over VPN so really, this is either a failure of the user or of IT infrastructure.

      --
      "No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
    6. Re:IT is a customer service group by thsths · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > I implemented a nightly shut down policy for our users

      Which is great, unless

      - you want to be able to access your PC from home

      - the virus scanner is set on read, so logging in takes 5 minutes in the morning

      - you want to run a simulation over night

      - updates should be run overnight

      So yes, there is a case for shutting down PCs, but it is not always easy. Users will do it if it works.

    7. Re:IT is a customer service group by amoeba1911 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's not just the government. I work for a hundred billion dollar company and we routinely do shit like that just to waste money so that we don't get screwed over the next year. What a total fucking waste... waste of resources, waste of time, waste of everything. Business as usual.

    8. Re:IT is a customer service group by dave562 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's also based on the assumption that the IT department doesn't setup Wake On LAN to wake the PCs up 10 minutes before people start showing up for work.

    9. Re:IT is a customer service group by hodet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I've been working in IT for many years and my experience has been that if a Sysadmin hates his users it says a lot more about him then it does the users. YMMV

    10. Re:IT is a customer service group by Ced_Ex · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You think spending up to the budget is only restricted to government?

      This happens everywhere, especially in large corporations like banks and insurance companies.

      --
      Live forever, or die trying.
    11. Re:IT is a customer service group by afidel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nothing the government can spend money on is as wasteful as having one in four able bodied adults sitting around doing nothing productive! If you don't get that point then I'm sorry but you have no reason. I'm not a fan of big government but unfortunately when the financial system implodes the only entity big enough to even attempt to fix it is government. There will be waste, graft, back room deals and wasteful spending on the way to recovery, but hopefully a large percentage of that waste will end up entering the money stream and accelerating the flow of money which is the ONLY thing that will stave off mass unemployment. Money is only better spent in the private sector when the private sector is actually willing to make use of it, at the moment almost everyone in the private sector is hording cash and decelerating the flow of money.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    12. Re:IT is a customer service group by dave562 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As I was posting, I thought to myself, "Someone is going to say how ten minutes isn't enough time." Then I thought, "I should say thirty minutes. But then someone will say thirty minutes is too much time." In the end I figured that anyone on /. would be able to consider that ten minutes was completely arbitrary, and that the meta-point was that companies can set a time that works for their environment.

  2. Desktop hibernation support sucks terribly. by legoboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  3. Remote Access ... by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Remote Access ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why not have users RDP into a server? With roaming profiles, the user should get the same desktop & apps available to them from a server-based RDP session as they get on their desktop. And their files are on the network, right?

    2. Re:Remote Access ... by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you have any idea how many apps can't be used on a terminal server due to licensing restrictions?

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  4. Re:Two Words: Remote Desktop by qoncept · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  5. Old Attitudes.. by coniferous · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Absolutely not. by Suzuran · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?)

    1. Re:Absolutely not. by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You sysadmins don't know how lucky you got it! Try working PC repair for awhile. I bet you can take your worst moron and multiply them by 20 and that would be about average for what I get during an average week. I get to have conversations like this-"I needed to move the computer so I just grabbed it and yanked and now there are wires and screws and stuff hanging out the back. Is that bad?" or "I just got this new computer and I want you to take this USB backup thingie and make my new computer have all my stuff on it" 'me'-Uuuhhh where is the disc with the software that you used to back your stuff up with sir? " I threw that out. It has a button you push to back stuff up, surely there is a "put stuff back" button on there." ARRRGH!

      trust me sysadmins, you guys got it good. picture the dumbest bumblehead you got and increase the stupid by about a dozen and I'll have dealt with somebody worse that week. A bazillion pieces of proprietary junk and NEVER have they EVER got the disc, they expect everything to just magically work like something out of hackers no matter how crazy an idea they cook up(I once had a cop bring his wife's PC in so I could "Hack her Yahoo" to see if she was cheating) and they are ALWAYS amazed that stuff costs so much. You have to deal with legacy cruft like you would NOT believe(I had to even build a DOS 3 PC LAST YEAR so I could rig up an ISA card to an 85k lathe from a company that hasn't been business since 89) and more weird and fucked up formats than you can even count. So trust me admins you haven't even gotten CLOSE to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to stupid. At least your hardware and software is pretty uniform. Count your blessings.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  7. Re:harder than it seemed by PitaBred · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.