PC operating systems have incorporated power management functionality for years. Historically low U.S. energy costs and limited capabilities, however, have stunted power management adoption. Power management had been most compelling only to those mobile computing users who sought to tease out precious extra minutes of battery life. The world, however, has changed.
Each computing platform is expected to be optimized to add value to the enterprise in as efficient and low cost manner as possible. The U.S. government’s ENERGY STAR recommendations advocate use of low-power settings (sleep, hibernate, etc.) to save energy, money, and reduce environmental impact.
Power management vendors have adopted those as core best practices and added features to adapt their centralized power management point solutions to different needs and environments.
Several.
An initial benefit is the ability to quantify current PC energy consumption and the impact of implementing power policies. This is not only valuable for proving the value of the solution but also for qualifying for rebates and incentives increasingly offered by local utilities and states (click here for examples).
A second is to manage PC states without negatively impacting the user or automated IT support processes. Traditional, OS-embedded power management functionality is underdeveloped in this area.
Other benefits include reducing office cooling requirements, decreasing any utility peak-load demand surcharges, updating desktop policies remotely and gaining recognition and, perhaps, financial reward for environmentally conscious computing practices.
These benefits are not natively available in either Microsoft or Apple operating systems, including Windows 7.
Ability to define computer inactivity at more granular levels than basic keyboard or mouse-click activity, such as disk utilization, CPU usage, application operation.
Understand enterprise needs — specifically, critical current and anticipated requirements. These will drive the selection criteria that determine which vendor’s solution is the correct one for a particular enterprise. For example:
The goal is to identify vendors that have the right functional mix, meet current and anticipated requirements, at a price point that can accelerate investment payback and meet the ROI hurdle.
Contact Gartner Research for their report dated March 25, 2009 – ‘PC Power Management Tools Market Update’
Take advantage of free vendor evaluation trials. At a minimum, these will allow an enterprise to benchmark current power consumption and cost. More than likely, they will also allow an enterprise to start enjoying cost savings and green IT bragging rights with zero initial investment! Enterprise-wide deployment can occur in waves, with successively more granular and fine-tuned profiles as the economic impact of power management is monitored, measured, and analyzed.
Although each situation is different, ENERGY STAR estimates electricity savings per PC are roughly 50% or $25-75 per year based on a reduction of approximately 200 KWH per computer per year. Cost savings are driven by dropping computers into a reduced power state for an average of 15 hours a day without impacting business readiness or compromising automated IT maintenance processes.
A variety of calculators are available to tailor savings estimates to specific situations. Click here to view a sample ROI calculator. For example, a global financial services firm recently evaluated centralized power management alternatives with the expectation of realizing $1.5 million in annual savings from its 50,000 global desktops.
Other potential savings areas include reduced office cooling loads, saving an additional $5-10 per PC annually — as much as $10-25 or more in warm climates — and decreased peak load demand charges levied by some utilities.
Given the lack of historical attention to centralized power management, at this time both financial and environmental quick wins are relatively easy to achieve.
Although most IT organizations are not responsible for power consumption beyond their data centers, a compelling case exists for their broader involvement in green IT. Centralized IT power management benefits the enterprise, and even the IT organization, in several fundamentally important ways: