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Why IT Won't Power Down PCs
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Apr 16, 2009 01:42 PM
from the sheer-cussedness dept.
from the sheer-cussedness dept.
snydeq writes "Internal politics and poor leadership on sustainable IT strategies are among the top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management — to the tune of $2.8 billion wasted per year powering unused PCs. According to a recent survey, 42 percent of IT shops do not manage PC energy consumption simply because no one in the organization has been made responsible for doing so — this despite greater awareness of IT power-saving myths, and PC power myths in particular. Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.' In other words, resources spent by IT vs. the permanent energy crisis appear to result in little payback for IT."
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IT: IT Vs. the Permanent Energy Crisis 285 comments
snydeq writes "Organizations looking to remain profitable in the face of escalating energy costs may lean even harder on IT to achieve energy efficiencies in the years to come, InfoWorld reports. But instead of limiting IT's efficiency role to the datacenter, companies will tap IT's vast knowledge of company networks, equipment, and work processes to uncover efficiencies across the organization, in some cases tipping facilities management into IT. 'There is a lot IT can do to fix its own 2 percent [of the company's carbon emissions] and make it more efficient, but the big opportunity for IT is to take a leadership role in tackling that other 98 percent across the business,' says one analyst. And by taking charge of the organization's energy strategy now, IT will be in prime position to alter its relationship with management and reap benefits in the boardroom in the years ahead, analysts contend."
[+]
10 IT Power-Saving Myths Debunked 359 comments
snydeq writes "InfoWorld examines 10 power-saving assumptions IT has been operating under in its quest to rein in energy costs vs. the permanent energy crisis. Under scrutiny, most such assumptions wither. From true CPU efficiency, to the life span effect of power-down frequency on servers, to SSD power consumption, to switching to DC in the datacenter, get the facts before setting your IT energy strategy."
[+]
Five PC Power Myths Debunked 551 comments
snydeq writes "Turning off PCs during periods of inactivity can save companies between $25 and $75 per PC per year, according to Energy Star, savings that can add up quickly for large organizations. Yet most organizations remain behind the times on PC power management, in large part due to common misperceptions about PC power, writes InfoWorld's Ted Samson, who outlines five PC power myths debunked in a recent report from Forrester, ranging from the energy savings of screen savers, to the energy draw of powering up, to the difficulties of issuing patches to systems in lower-power states."
[+]
Companies Waste $2.8 Billion Per Year Powering Unused PCs 348 comments
snydeq writes "Unused PCs — computers that are powered on but not in use — are expected to emit approximately 20 million tons of CO2 this year, roughly equivalent to the impact of 4 million cars, according to report by 1E and the Alliance to Save Energy. All told, US organizations will waste $2.8 billion to power 108 million unused machines this year. The notion that power used turning on PCs negates any benefits of turning them off has been discussed recently as one of five PC power myths. By turning off unused machines and practicing proper PC power management, companies stand to save more than $36 per desktop PC per year."
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IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubly so for IT Ops. If the business tells IT it wants PC's powered off when not in use, then it will happen. So far, for the most part, that businesses haven't asked. It's disingenuous to lay this problem at the feet of the IT department.
Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point.
Also worth considering is that if IT departments aren't introducing it because they're scared of losing budget flexibility, then this is a failure of the top level budgetting process. If I, as megacorp's IT director, introduce measures that save £2 million per annum off megacorp's energy bill, I should expect a little more flexibility in a couple of months time when I go to the board asking for extra cash for hardware upgrades. It sounds like this isn't happening.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Informative)
I see your problem. You think managers are logical and considerate. You are wrong, sadly.
I worked for the state of Georgia a few years back, during my time there our group cut our districts IT costs essentially in half, not my doing or anything but it happened either way.
At the end of the year we had a large amount of cash left over in our budget because of the ways we came up with to save during the year.
You know what happened? We spent almost every dime we had left over doing stupid training for things we were perfectly qualified to manage already because our next years budget would be based on what we spent the previous year.
So ... rather than doing our jobs well and being rewarded by getting a little more consideration when we actually NEEDED the money in the future, we had to waste it to ensure that we'd get the funds next time around, even though we knew we wouldn't need them unless something unforeseen happened or that we'd need the money in a couple years when the next round of upgrades/replacement needed to occur. You simply can't budget properly in that state because once you've given some money back, getting an increase later is next to impossible, you have to ramp up over several years in order to get some extra for upgrades/replacements of major systems.
It was worse than just that however, not only did we have a surplus that we wasted, we had other groups in our district that had surpluses as well, which rather than losing the funding the following year they would figure out ways to funnel the money to us (legitimately) so we could spend it on new equipment to justify their budget.
The other groups had extra money because they would get grants and federal funding to do projects, but the funding wouldn't be around the following year, so to continue those public health projects in the future, they really needed to keep their allotment for the next year high enough to pay for everthing.
I write this comment and still think it was absolutely retarded, but those poor bastards that were actually doing the work couldn't do 'the right thing' because it would only screw them within a couple of years because managers and politicians up stream are so broken and stupid that they reward wastefulness and punish efficiency.
There really is no reason that your typical government worker wants to be efficient, they just get punished for it later. Try to remember that next time you go to the health department, DMV or whatever government office and you see them doing something that seems like a complete and utter waste of resources. They probably are fully aware of it, but have to do it anyway so they don't get fucked later and end up with too little money and some stupid politician asking them why they ran out.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
You think spending up to the budget is only restricted to government?
This happens everywhere, especially in large corporations like banks and insurance companies.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, if IT goes around imposing such a policy without the business asking for it, they'll open up a huge hornets' nest. The IT department can suggest it as a way for the business to save money, and maybe some IT departments have been lax in not doing so, but without the business actually telling them to do it IT is not going to. In fact, the business would be pretty pissed off if they did.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Interesting)
I implemented a nightly shut down policy for our users because I got sick and tired of them lying to me about the last time they rebooted their PC.
"Everything is running like crap"
"Have you rebooted?"
"Yeah, like 5 times."
*walk over to PC, bring up command prompt*
-net statistics server
"Statistics since 8:00AM at ."
*facepalm*
I pitched it to management as power savings, but really I could care less. I just wanted to have a way to force those bastards to reboot every night. And yes, it did make a pretty significant difference in the amount of support calls I got. I suppose you can thank Windows XP for saving power, haha.
PS-Is it wrong for a sysadmin to hate his user base? Even if they're really, really stupid, because your company is cheap and only hires incompetent morons (excluding the sysadmin, naturally...)?
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Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe it is right and proper for a sysadmin to hate the users. This has been the order of things since the time of the dinosaurs, and the way it should be. We can't all be the BOFH, but we can all try.
(Besides, if I didn't hate the users, what excuse would I have for keeping a bat under my desk to threaten the users with?)
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Re:Absolutely not. (Score:5, Insightful)
You sysadmins don't know how lucky you got it! Try working PC repair for awhile. I bet you can take your worst moron and multiply them by 20 and that would be about average for what I get during an average week. I get to have conversations like this-"I needed to move the computer so I just grabbed it and yanked and now there are wires and screws and stuff hanging out the back. Is that bad?" or "I just got this new computer and I want you to take this USB backup thingie and make my new computer have all my stuff on it" 'me'-Uuuhhh where is the disc with the software that you used to back your stuff up with sir? " I threw that out. It has a button you push to back stuff up, surely there is a "put stuff back" button on there." ARRRGH!
trust me sysadmins, you guys got it good. picture the dumbest bumblehead you got and increase the stupid by about a dozen and I'll have dealt with somebody worse that week. A bazillion pieces of proprietary junk and NEVER have they EVER got the disc, they expect everything to just magically work like something out of hackers no matter how crazy an idea they cook up(I once had a cop bring his wife's PC in so I could "Hack her Yahoo" to see if she was cheating) and they are ALWAYS amazed that stuff costs so much. You have to deal with legacy cruft like you would NOT believe(I had to even build a DOS 3 PC LAST YEAR so I could rig up an ISA card to an 85k lathe from a company that hasn't been business since 89) and more weird and fucked up formats than you can even count. So trust me admins you haven't even gotten CLOSE to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to stupid. At least your hardware and software is pretty uniform. Count your blessings.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
> I implemented a nightly shut down policy for our users
Which is great, unless
- you want to be able to access your PC from home
- the virus scanner is set on read, so logging in takes 5 minutes in the morning
- you want to run a simulation over night
- updates should be run overnight
So yes, there is a case for shutting down PCs, but it is not always easy. Users will do it if it works.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Informative)
To reply to my own post.. two other things to work around..
- If you can turn off all PC's, you can turn them all on. Force all machines on at 2am via WoL, check for updates, and shut off when done. Its actually pretty easy to setup.
- Use that same WOL tool to turn on all computers at 7:45 or a bit earlier, so that the virus scan updates, and general booting of the services, is done before the people log in a few minutes before 8am..
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of a joke!
A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"
The man below says: "Yes you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."
"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.
"I do," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but it's of no use to anyone."
The man below says, "You must work in business as a manager." "I do," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going, but you expect me to be able to help. You're in the same position you were before we met but now it's my fault."
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
So, IT Departments aren't meant to be proactive and show initiative, and make the company more profitable?
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Insightful)
This, in fact, is one of the reasons why, when we explored this idea, it was rejected from the get go. That and jobs, reports etc. that run automatically, defragging that happens at night, patch updates that may take a long time, backups, and the erratic work schedules of academians in general.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Funny)
In that case, the resignation can wait until tomorrow morning.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:4, Informative)
Think proactively not reactively and you will find yourself better situated in life. Go to your boss and say "hey I found out a way to save us 5% on our electricity bill, we can power off peoples desk computers" as opposed to your boss saying "hey how come i read an article about saving money on electricity simply by powering off our computers while you did not? OK now power off EVERYTHING at night"....which as you know is pretty DUMB.
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose. Really though I was just shocked that 11% of IT managers stated they "hate the Earth" as their reason for not powering down...
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Re:IT is a customer service group (Score:5, Informative)
First google result: http://www.astahost.com/info.php/shut-down-restart-log-off-xp-using-batch-file_t3715.html [astahost.com]
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I've seen this first hand (Score:5, Interesting)
Despite calculating that the organization could save $75K annually (this was a conservative estimate), their marketing department put a stop to the idea. Why marketing? Because the company had just gone through a "rebranding" and the marketing department had designed a new screensaver for all workstations with the new logo/slogan. None of these computers were in client facing positions, so effectively, they were insistent on wasting energy to advertise....to themselves!
No, I'm not kidding.
Re:I've seen this first hand (Score:5, Funny)
Hah, I have a similar story. We have a big fancy website, and the regional CEO, in an effort to drive traffic told IT to set a policy that forced everyone's home page to be our website.
So every time anyone opens a browser window, they go to that site. Hundreds and hundreds of workers, thousands and thousands of times a day, every single connection going out on one single IP address, resulting in exactly one unique page view, per day.
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Re:I've seen this first hand (Score:4, Interesting)
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Desktop hibernation support sucks terribly. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure it has nothing to do with bad hardware or bad drivers that randomly refuse to wake up from hibernation and the hassles and expense of supporting related issues.
Re:Desktop hibernation support sucks terribly. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Remote Access ... (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as I can apply a group policy to our Windows PCs to go to sleep yet still be available via RDP for end users without requiring them to jump through hoops or writing some script they have to run to trigger wake on lan, then I'll have our PCs use power saving.
Until then, they run all the time so when a user happens to be out of office and needs to access their desktop they can still VPN in and use RDP to get to their PC.
Feel free to point me at a graceful solution, but the best I've seen so far is a web page to send the wake on lan packet. Thats nice and all, but I'd rather just pay the power bill instead, its far easier than explaining it to everyone who isn't a geek.
Re:Remote Access ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not have users RDP into a server? With roaming profiles, the user should get the same desktop & apps available to them from a server-based RDP session as they get on their desktop. And their files are on the network, right?
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Re:Remote Access ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have any idea how many apps can't be used on a terminal server due to licensing restrictions?
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Two Words: Remote Desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
99% of the time, if I'm not sitting in front of it reading Slashdot, my work PC is merrily chugging along folding proteins [stanford.edu] and using up company electricity.
But that other 1% of the time, I'm using it from home, because I've gotten called up to fix some urgent client problem.
To save that $75 worth of electricity, my company would have to require that I drive in to the office every time a client has a hiccup that I can diagnose and fix in five minutes. I don't get paid by the hour, but I'm fortunate enough to work someplace that values my time -- including my non-work time. They would consider that $75 to be money well spent to keep me able, and most importantly *willing*, to take time out on a Saturday to fix a simple problem.
Re:Two Words: Remote Desktop (Score:5, Insightful)
To save that $75 worth of electricity ...
Or, to save half, disallow installing software that sits there and uses 100% of your available CPU time.
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Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a pain in the ass, no one really cares, and the first time some manager had data loss from a machine shutting itself down, the policy would end.
If we all sat down and set up our networks so that everything correctly booted and shutdown when the network told it to, we could attach power management stuff to the whole network...Assuming that everything correctly saved state when it shut down, so that people didn't lose all their work when their machine automatically shut itself off.
They're treating this like it's just lazy admins, but its a knotty problem, and not a particularly critical one. In datacenters the computers are the primary energy draw, in office buildings it's light and climate control, and, judging by the heating bills in the winter, the computers aren't really heating the building up that much.
I just don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Make it part of logout (Score:5, Interesting)
The OS and hardware should incorporate power saving into machines that are logged out.
Our users are instructed to logout, but to leave their machines on for patches and the like.
If the OS could detect when the user was logged out and no services in the background where doing things we could
really turn down the machine.
A logged off machine's cpu could virtually go to sleep, the harddrives slow to 5200rpm or lower, the monitor go to sleep, and so on.
yes it's not as good as shutting the computer completely off, but maybe with some better types of wake on lan we can get as close as possible. Or scheduled turn on and off. Like tell windows to shut off from 7:00 P.M. till 1:00....turn on to get updates and then shut back down.
Ulitmately this just needs to be the default for future version of OSs like windows and the like. I think we really have to make it a brain dead for IT as possible. I've got enough other crap to worry about...although I do worry about the world engergy problems.
Old Attitudes.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny, I work at a school where all the pcs shut off at 8:00 every night.
The major push to make it that way was provided for by the students. They were very concerned by the energy use of our computers. Good for them.
No incentive for those who do not pay per kwh... (Score:4, Insightful)
I work in a high rise office building. Our power is included in our lease for the space. There is no incentive for me to power down workstations at night. That being said, you could argue that I would be helping everyone for the greater good. It still comes down to me expending resources without any direct benefit either way. The lease is not cheaper if I use less power. If my office paid per kwh, then it makes sense. Till then, my workstations stay on at night.
Oh and my workstations do not sit idle. Full anti-virus scans and updates are performed in off hours in order to minimize impact during the work day.
I was told it wears out the computer (Score:4, Funny)
I've been told on many occasions that turning it on and off, and heating & cooling, flexes the motherboard and will lead to premature failure. Also, hard drives spinning up and down all the time moves the magnetic domains "outward" and so your data all accumulates near the outer edge of the disk and the head has a tougher and tougher time reading it all in. Also turning on and off the monitor makes the colors become less bright, so after a few years all you see are "fall" colours like yellows, reds, and oranges... eventually... it only shows white (the screen equivalent of "winter")
If you try to type something on your keyboard when your computer is off, the bits accumulate in the cord (that's why the old keyboard cables were always coiled... the bits were bigger back then so the coiling resulted in more space for the bits to accumulate) and eventually if you keep typing over the years with your computer off (or if your cat walks on the keyboard even) the cord will fail, probably at the back of your PC and all the bits will flow out on the ground and so your password can be read by hackers with laser beams such as those found in your CD or DVD drive.
harder than it seemed (Score:5, Interesting)
I teach physics at a community college, and I recently made a big push to get proper power management set up in the science division's computer labs. It ended up being orders of magnitude more work than I thought it would.
I had seemed like a total no-brainer to me. We had 42 desktop Windows machines in our student computer labs. They were running 24/7. They had CRT monitors, and they were configured so that when they weren't being used, they ran a waving flag animation on the screen, meaning that both the CPU and the monitor were drawing full power. Here we were teaching our students about global warming, but we had this ridiculously wasteful configuration.
The first issue was that, as the slashdot summary suggests is common, nobody really cared, because it was some other part of the organization that was paying the electric bills.
The second issue was that when I approached IT, they wanted to handle it using software called Deep Freeze [faronics.com], which not only handles power management but also automatically restores the computer's hard disk to a known state every so often. This is in principle a good idea, because it means that students can't screw up the machines, and it's another layer of defense against malware. However, it opened up a whole can of worms, because if they were going to make this new hard disk image, they wanted to make sure it was done right. They wanted to update the OS, and install all the apps from scratch. Well, we had a ton of apps dating back to ca. 1995 that were still being used for instruction, but nobody could find the licenses for them. So that became a huge issue. It was one that we would have had to deal with sooner or later anyway, but it was a clear example where the easiest thing to do is always to leave things the way they are.
So we finally got that done, after much interpersonal conflict and hurt feelings. Now we have the new issue, which seems to be that Deep Freeze doesn't play nicely with Windows updates. In one lab, for example, we have about 60 machines, roughly half belonging to the science division. Their hard disks get reimaged over the weekend by Deep Freeze. But wait, then on Monday morning people walk into the lab and power up all the machines. Now all 60 machines phone home and realize that they need an update from MS; they had the update before, but it got erased by the reimaging. So they all start downloading the same 100 Mb update at once, with predictable effects. A chemistry teacher brings in a whole class to do work on the computers, and the computers are completely unusable. Oops, time to come up with a new lesson plan. Hope he's good at thinking on his feet.
Of course there's no reason in principle that all of these different issues had to be coupled together. E.g., Faronics, which sells Deep Freeze, has another product that only does power management, not reimaging. But the thing is, in real life you're dealing with complex systems and complex human organizations, and lots of well-intentioned changes can have unintended effects.
Re:harder than it seemed (Score:4, Informative)
We have deep freeze as well here where I work. We have it turn off the pc's at 11pm. It turns them all on at 2:55am unfrozen, windows update runs at 3am (with the auto-install) also symantec anti-virus runs, and at 4am it refreezes the machines and shuts them back down. Wake-on-Lan will need to be setup on the PC's but this system works very well for patching & updating the machines while also keeping them frozen from mal-ware.
Let your IT guys know, it should be that simple... at least as far as freezing & updates.
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Re:harder than it seemed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Simple. Power management SUCKS! (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking at what runs on the desktops of nearly every company with an IT department (and yes, your company may be different--GOOD for you!), we're faced with Windows. And at the end of the day, Windows does power management very poorly. If it worked _exactly_ as advertised, then it would be an ugly and painful kludge of overlapping terms and areas of control. Is suspending a computer more like "standby" or "hibernate?" What if I choose standby in 5 minutes, but turn off hard drives in 15 minutes? Who wins? Also, is my computer idle if I have an application running on it for hours (or days) on end? Does Firefox get treated the same as a gcc job?
However, that's in an ideal fantasy world. In reality, it's much worse. Some computers work, some don't. Some work one day, but fail after a MS patch. Some let you choose hibernate but won't do it, some will go to sleep and never wake up again. Now before anyone jumps in with 'oddball hardware' and such, let me point out these two points:
1) I see this behaviour with XP SP3 on an off-the-shelf Dell laptop certified for (and shipped with) XP. I see it on HP desktops under the same conditions. It's not just fringe cases, it's the definition of mainstream business computers!
2) It doesn't MATTER what hardware I have! If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Microsoft hasn't been able to get this working well since 1995 (or earlier--did Win3.1 have power management stuff in it?). Even if Vista or Windows 7 get it right, it won't matter at this point because nobody is willing to bother with power management anymore. The pain has been too great for too long for us to let it into our psyche, and it's not likely to suddenly happen now.
If our users could figure out how to turn a PC on (Score:4, Interesting)
... then we'd power them off. But, undoubtably this would lead to helpdesk calls.
I have responded to "dead PC" calls when, in fact, the PC was not plugged in, monitor not turned on, etc. At one job, that was like 20% of the work load.
Misguided policy, wrong question, stupid answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Our group was recently informed "the simple act of shutting down PCs at night can save a company with 10,000 PCs over $260,000 a year". We kicked around the idea.
That's an alleged savings of $26/year/computer, or about $0.09/day.
Assuming it takes 10 minutes daily to turn a computer on, wait for boot, and fiddle with getting everything back up to where it was*, we're looking at something vaguely around $6.00 spent just to recover from "the simple act of shutting down [an employee's] PC at night".
So turning off the computer at night costs roughly 64 times as much as leaving the durn thing on.
(* - I've got 20 windows open right now, and half of them took considerable time to get to where they are now as I'm debugging something.)
Re:Useless.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you mean
Internal politics and poor leadership in [almost every business] are the cause of almost every single problem in [almost every business].
From GM to AIG, from the US Senate to the government of Zimbabwa; that statement works for almost everything.
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Re:Classic (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:You don't say..? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on perspective, I guess. Since we are an IT board, I think it is good to point this out as an IT problem. If this were a management board, then the question would be how do you properly set up your budgets to hold folks accountable for the areas they should be held accountable for. I know in most organizations, an IT department could institute a power savings plan get no credit for the savings but be responsible for any expenses (new software) to help implement it. And if anything went wrong, some poor IT manager would be left hanging. Can you truly blame the manager for not wanting to stick his neck out for no reward?
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Re:You don't say..? (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, in many companies IT would be doing a whole lot of work so the Facilities manager can get a raise. Hell, IT might even get reprimanded for creating busy work for itself instead of focusing on core deliverables or some other bullshit.
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