Putting PCs to sleep, revisited

I wanted to address to some comments posted in response to my article about savings you can reap by employing desktop power management at your organization.

Some commentors suggested that shutting down systems at night results in wasted productivity in the morning, as users have to sit there waiting for the PCs to reboot.

That would be true if users were, indeed, expected to turn on their systems each morning. However, products I mentioned in my article are capable of waking up systems at predetermined times, through wake on LAN. Thus, an admin might set policies to wake up systems 15 minutes before users are due to arrive.

Also, powering down the system doesn’t necessarily mean shutting it down. There are lower-power modes such as Standby, a state in which a system uses far less energy and which doesn’t take much time to wake up from.

A couple of people also posed questions or observations as to why companies haven’t done this in the past (or currently).

Based on my discussions and research, I’d attribute it to a few factors:

1. Companies aren’t aware that these type of products exist, or don’t understand how they work. (See above.)

2. A lot of companies haven’t been associating IT energy consumption with electric bills, which is understandable: different department heads, different bills. Thus, getting users to power down down at night hasn’t been a priority. (A lot of companies seem to leave their lights on all night, too.) But as the country (and the world) is becoming more eco-conscious, as well as concerns grow about power shortages, that’s changing.

3. There are misconceptions that it’s “bad” for PC to turn it off and on, because of some perceived excessive wear and tear it experiences when it powers on. Plenty of research I’ve seen dispels that myth.

4. There’s concern that systems need to awake at night for patching and backups, so as not to disrupt users while they work. That’s true — but it’s also, again, where various products on the market come in: They can wake up systems for patch and backup, then power them down again.

Finally, a couple of vendor reps, one from Sun and one from Symbio, weighed in to pitch their thin-client products as less energy-hungry alternatives to PCs. I generally don’t like my blog to be used as a forum for vendors to pimp their wares, but their general points are worth noting. Though I will point out to Lew Tischler at Symbio that I have written about thin clients recently.