Cloud-based PC power management is being offered to smaller businesses, to enable them to get the benefit of reduced power bills and lower carbon emissions.
Power management specialist Verismic showed a system for host-based PC power management at the Green IT Expo in London on Tuesday, and rival 1E discussed plans to come out with a cloud-based option, which can manage PCs in low-power states in the next few months.
The potential for saving electricity (around £25 per desktop per year) and reducing a company’s carbon footprint is immense – eWEEK readers recently rated desktop power management as the number one way to cut the carbon footprint of IT.
However, most desktop management systems require an on-site server, and represent the kind of IT commitment that only a large organisation can make, even though the payback time is usually around six months.
“For the small to mid-size business this can often mean PC Power Management is too difficult to justify as a project,” said Mark McGinn, Managing Director of Verismic, at the event. Allowing companies to have their PCs managed remotely with a web-based interface could open up the savings to more businesses.
“Our system was designed from the ground up with the potential to be managed remotely,” said McGinn, who addressed questions about security in his talk, and emphasised the importance of getting user co-operation in any move to control desktop systems remotely.
“The penetration of PC power management is only about 80 percent,” said analyst Andrew Donoghue of the 451 Group. “Cloud based services could make it more practical for smaller businesses.”
Other vendors agree. “This is an important opportunity which we plan to address in the near future,” said Andy Hawkins, product manager at 1E, maker of the NightWatchman power management product.
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There are other PC power management products in the marketplace that offer behavioural change as well as brute force shutdowns.
Agreed, and it is true that brute force shutdown is only one aspect of power saving that we promote with Verismic Power Manager. Flexibility and intelligent management are critical for successful projects otherwise the project is dead before it begins.
With Verismic, cloud capabilities help PC Power Management to become available to more organisations than otherwise would have access and in a simpler to administer form; but the technology also contains the capability to dynamically extend power saving even without putting systems into sleep mode, never mind full power off.
Data Synergy's PowerMAN has been offering SaaS based PC power management for several years. The solution was designed from the ground up to offer this service and is available from a number of managed service providers in the UK, US, Australia, and Europe. No on site server is required and best of all, the solution may be used, free of charge for up to 30 days on an unlimited number of computers.
New Boundary Technologies also offers cloud-based PC power management called PwrSmart Service. http://newboundary.com/products/pwrsmart-service. The only locally installed component is the client - everything else is in the cloud. PwrSmart Service is available from New Boundary Technologies’ resellers throughout Europe, Central and South America, Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and throughout North America. http://newboundary.com/products/pwrsmart-service