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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?
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.
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.
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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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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.
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.
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?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
... 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.
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.
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."
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 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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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
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.
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?
... 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?"
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?)
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?
The less idle machines sitting around for the botnets and worms, the better.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.