Which is most exciting? Wind farms and green power stations, or loft insulation? You may, of course, say neither, but when you talk about renewable energy, most people get more interested in a big new plant, than in small moves to cut waste, distributed across the network.
Despite this, it’s generally agreed that cutting waste and making better use of the energy we have is more cost-effective in reducing emissions than building a new generating plant. And of course, Britain’s future energy crisis is so stark now, that we must do both.
There’s a similar sort of thought-process going on around PC power management.
eWEEK readers have told us in our polls that controlling PCs is the quickest win for any company wanting to reduce its carbon footprint. Switching off laptops and PCs, can cut energy consumption massively. But Green IT events tend to focus on bigger centralised initiatives, for instance the launch of new low-energy data centres.
Data centres are visible, and servers use lots of power, all on one electricity bill. So Green IT has tended to concentrate on making them more efficient.
By contrast, desktop PCs have been largely unnoticed, even though as many as 80 percent of corporate PCs may be left on overnight. Not through carelessness, but because the IT department demands it, so urgent security patches can be downloaded and installed at any time.
For some years, desktop management products have been able to manage the power state of PCs, so they can be put into deep sleep, and only woken up when a software update is needed. These solutions have tended to be a bit complex to put in place, but have a clear payback of around £25 per desktop per year, so the technology pays for itself in a year or so.
Despite this, there is still a very low take-up of the offerings.
The reasons probably include the perceived difficulty of implementing the solutions, and the fact that electricity bills are often masked in facilities contracts. That factor may change if the government keeps its word on the CRC energy efficiency scheme. CRC has become an energy tax on large organisations and will effectively add to the cost of energy, unless it is destroyed by business lobbyists.
Smaller businesses have not been able to use the typical power management products, because they don’t have enough to justify the additional infrastructure cost. To get round this, a few suppliers are now talking about offering desktop management from the cloud.
In the end, though, this tech won’t become ubiquitous until it becomes very easy. All PCs should be running anti-virus, and the proportion has increased, because there are plenty of good services which are free to consumers (such as Avast, AVG and ESET) and all PCs ship with a free introduction to one of the large commercial offerings.
Power management won’t get used more until it is as universally available – and preferably a lot easier t0 use – than anti-virus.
Now there are signs that this is happening, but it is slow. Microsoft’s systems management offerings include some features, and Novell is making power management a major plank of ZenWorks. This sort of move ought to get more corporate PCs under control, but it is mostly about selling more copies of one systems management product or another. Analyst Andrew Donoghue of The 451 Group describes it as a “Trojan Horse”.
What we need next is for power management to get bundled. We want small-business and consumer-level PCs to come with access to a cloud-based PC power management.
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Even with names like Microsoft and Novell considering power mgmt functions in their products, this has been an important topic for a long time. Companies like 1E (http://www.1e.com) have been providing software to shutdown and wakeup PCs intelligently for a number of years. The cost savings are substantial. No reason to wait for a cloud-hosted solution just to save money. In fact, if you do the due dilligence now to make your IT org efficient, the cloud can wait until your actually ready for it.
There are obviously some power management tools integrated into Windows - and Windows 7 does a better job of it than previous versions.
But there is a lot more than PC makers - and chip makers - could be doing to make centralised PC power management a lot easier for businesses. Desktop virtualisation will also be an issue here and may take hold - along with thin clients before much changes in the traditional PC world.
One company worth keeping an eye on is Miserware which actually approach the problem of PC energy efficiency at the chip-level. They have products aimed at the PC and Datacenter which effectively scale back the chip energy usage without compromising performance below acceptable levels (you can specify SLAs)
http://www.miserware.com/products/
Interesting observation from Andrew Donoghue about power management being a Trojan Horse for enterprise suite vendors. New Boundary Technologies saw the need for an easy solution that small to large organizations could quickly implement, with immediate payback in the first month. We released our cloud-based PwrSmart Service in August of 2010. No need to wait a year for ROI with a subscription-based service that costs a fraction of monthly energy savings.
PC Power Management IS Bundled but it isn't used.
Vista and Windows 7 both did great things for the windows platform's energy efficiency but all it really did is expose more capabilities; what it didn't do is put these into effect in a coherent manner which is why we produced Verismic Power Manager. http://www.versimic.com
This issue isn't really the fault of Microsoft because there are many reasons why it doesn't come fully enabled by default with three main factors being users, IT Departments, and the applications people use.
Something that affects the availability of a machine is a reason for somebody to turn the feature off, therefore users have a nasty habit of disabling settings if they can. GPO helps override this but falls foul of situations where users have valid reasons to disable settings or where certain conditions should mean varying power management settings (work hours, location etc) and this is one of the reasons for power management products.
IT Departments also have a tendency to like systems being available at all times and something specifically designed to make systems unavailable can mean IT are a barrier to implementing PC Power Management. In addition to this is the major concern over how power management will affect critical applications or users' work and this can make IT scared of the support impact.
This application impact is probably the biggest reason why IT are a barrier to implementation because it is not a standard part of application development to care about how an application interacts with power management. It is still the case that many applications just are not compatible and will generate errors when a system comes back from a low power mode.
Until this situation changes (and it won't be quickly because of the older applications that businesses use) we won't get to the state we expect from our mobile devices where powering down is simple and are applications are expected to be immediately available again.
To support this we have the PC Power Management solutions that are there to intelligently adapt the application of policies based on user, environmental, and system conditions to power manage while avoiding business impact. Aspects of this that we handle in our solution are time-based policies, application and system protection, dynamic cpu throttling, user interaction/education, and the ability to manage and control this over highly complex and distributed environments on-premise or hosted.
For now, the OS gives the capability but not the management intelligence; this is where the 3rd party vendors come in.
We consider ourselves to be the engine management system ensuring performance is available when needed, but that efficiency levels are kept optimal.