Endpoint Power Management as a Go Green Initiative

Power management for desktops , laptops or servers reduces the overall IT power consumption and helps is saving energy and reduce IT costs without any loss in productivity.Considering the rising costs of electricity power management has been on radar for an IT organization.

Power management for endpoints involves deploying power conservation policies and track the total energy saved.At a high level, management prefers that machines be powered down as frequently as possible to maximize energy savings. However, IT requires machines to be ON at night, when it is easiest to apply patches and updates. But again keeping the computers ON the full night is not an efficient solution.We can use "Wake-On-Lan" to power-on the computer as and when needed , in an On-Demand way.

Most computers (Windows & Mac) already have built-in power management features, and many end users are familiar with controls to automatically shut off the monitor or hard drive and put the computer into a low-power “standby” or “suspend” mode. However, these power conservation features are often underutilized by end users and rarely centrally managed, making them ineffective tools.

As organizations are seeking ways to reduce their overhead costs and improve their competitive position in the market, the use of  PC power management solution can show tremendous operating cost saving. A recent case study has shown that organizations can save upto $60 per machine by deploying power management policies. So if an organization has 20,000 computers , it could save $1.2 million annually.So lets save energy,save money and reduce the carbon in the cloud.

PC Power Management solutions available in the market include IBM's Tivoli Endpoint Manager, Lumension's Endpoint Power Management ,Symantec, Shavlik, Microsoft, Cisco.

A typical Power Management tool on a Windows operating system found under the screen saver tab :




How much electricity does a computer use ?

A computer generally uses electricity between 65 watts and 250 watts of which the monitor often needs between 35 watts and 80 watts.Try Joulemeter - a software tool that estimates the power consumption of a computer by monitoring computer resources, such as CPU utilization and screen brightness , cd-rom usage , HDD usage and thus estimates power usage.

Related Article : Desktop Power Management Considerations
+