Cutting costs: Power down
- Posted:
- 16:09 01 Mar 2004
- Topics:
- Green IT | Printers
Despite moves by suppliers to reduce
the power consumption of IT equipment, energy costs are still a
major drain for many organisations. Eric Doyle explains how costs
can be cut further.
Despite signs of recovery in the IT industry, many companies are
more cost-conscious than they have ever been. Although IT
departments have probably felt the crunch more than anyone else, a
drain on the IT budget is continuing when offices are empty at
night and at weekends. To estimate the savings potential, count the
number of PCs in the company, multiply this by 60 and place a pound
sign in front of the answer. According to government figures, this
is the potential annual saving if you take a few energy-efficiency
steps. Put another way, in a company with 200 PCs, turning off all
the computers and monitors every night and at weekends would save
£12,000 a year.
Computers and monitors account for half the electricity used in an
office and energy is being wasted every day, even by "energy
saving" hardware. With every workstation on standby mode, the
electricity meter continues to tick over at an alarming rate.
Action Energy, a government-funded body, estimates that £90m
is wasted annually by UK companies that leave computers turned on
when not in use. Reducing this would produce a saving of one tonne
of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
Garry Felgate, director of Action Energy, said, "I was walking past
a dealing house in London the other evening. Looking through the
window I could see about 50 screens showing a Windows screen saver,
even though it was a Sunday. Typically, these systems will be
wasting about £63 more of electricity a year than if they were
turned off."
A typical PC uses 40W when running, and between 20W and 30W on
standby - monitors run on 80W, using 10W to 15W on standby.
Action Energy was set up by the government as an independent
company to help businesses in the public sector to reduce the
energy they use. This remit has been broadened to include all
businesses, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs is taking on larger scale environmental protection by
engaging larger corporates and heavy industry.
"The good news is that if you use less energy you save more money,"
Felgate said. "We use that as a motivator, particularly for the
small to medium-sized businesses. So we have a number of offerings.
We have a helpline and, in certain cases, we will do a free survey
of a site. If you are replacing equipment, such as a boiler, we can
also offer interest-free loans."
More IT departments would already switch off their PCs but for the
fact that it is difficult to ensure that everyone obeys the rule
and remote roll-outs and software upgrades might be compromised.
One solution is Nightwatchman, supplied by Windows management
consultancy 1E, which can remotely power-down or turn on PCs with
Wake-on-Lan network cards.
A Nightwatchman agent is loaded on to each computer and runs in the
background until, at a scheduled time, it initiates a system
power-down. If any programs are running, such as word processors or
spreadsheets, the software saves any open files before closing down
the system. Any enabled system can also be turned back on remotely
when the IT team wants to load or upgrade software or apply a
security patch.
The software will run even when the user has pressed the off
button, but obviously not if the user switches off the wall socket
or unplugs the PC.
Sumir Karayi, chief executive of 1E, says, "Of all the users in
your company, 20% to 30% will not do what you ask them. Without
power management, if you want to do a roll-out over a weekend, at
least one quarter of the machines will be turned off. This means
visiting each machine just to flick a switch."
Switching off PCs has other benefits, according to Karayi.
"Switching PCs off can make them last longer. If you leave a
computer running for too long, software inefficiencies mean it will
eventually run out of memory. They are more functional if you
reboot them now and again."
Although the prospect of software for saving energy seems ideal,
Karayi admits that it is difficult to sell to IT departments as the
typical response is, "We would like to use it, but we don't pay the
bills - so we don't care."
He says, "We get more traction with sales linked to patch
application because you have to reboot machines after applying a
patch. To get the sales going on the energy savings front requires
the IT and facilities departments to talk to each other. This is
starting to happen and beginning to pay off."
Monitors are probably the most rewarding area for energy savings
because they can be turned off and on quickly without having to
wait for the operating system to shut down or boot up safely. The
myth is that the screensaver can save energy, but the truth is that
it doesn't reduce the monitor's power at all.
Action Energy advises that IT departments disable the use of
screensavers in favour of enabling monitor power-saving from the
Windows Control Panel. This reduces the power to about an eighth
and can be further cut by teaching users to switch off the screen
during lunch breaks and when leaving their desks for 15 minutes or
more. If a monitor is left switched on overnight it uses the energy
equivalent of a laser printer producing 800 A4 printouts.
Printers, scanners and other peripheral equipment used
intermittently should have a sleep mode or be turned off when not
required. Photocopiers also use large amounts of power and should
be switched off at night.
Karayi admits that turning equipment off can be annoying to users
unless it is implemented correctly. "We have a Swiss bank as a
customer and they use Nightwatchman to turn the computers off at
night and turn them on again in the morning. This has saved the
company real money because when the staff arrive, their PCs are
ready to use. In the past, employees would turn to their machines
and go for a coffee while they booted up," he says.
Felgate adds that similar automation can be applied to peripheral
equipment by investing in time-switches. Photocopiers and laser
printers are particularly wasteful, both in the time taken to boot
up and in the energy used. Cost-saving as a motivation is gaining
ground, Felgate says. "Power costs are increasing and will continue
to do so. Our argument is that any money you spend on energy that
you do not need to spend is money that would have gone into your
profits. Make savings and it goes straight to the bottom line," he
says.
By chipping away at energy inefficiencies, the £300m spent on
energy used by office equipment could be halved, according to
figures from Action Energy. The company also says that 70% of the
energy used in an air-conditioned office is accounted for by
dissipating the heat produced by hardware. Using low-energy
alternatives saves money, makes for more pleasant working
conditions and helps to protect the environment.
Power-saving rules
- Introduce laptop computers to replace desktops because they use 90% less energy
- Make sure that unnecessary or unused equipment is disconnected from the mains supply
- Turn off PCs, monitors, printers, fax machines and copiers every night and at weekends
- Turn computers, copiers and other office equipment to low-power, standby mode when not in use
- Turn off equipment that is rarely used or will not be used for a long period of time. Even if it is impractical to turn off the computer, the monitor and any attached printer can be turned off
- Connect PCs, monitors, fax machines and computer peripherals to one power board so that they can all be switched off together
- Disable screensavers and use the power management facilities on the PC
- Favour ink-jet printers over laser technology because they also use 90% less energy
- Replace standard cathode-ray monitors with LCD monitors
- Ensure purchases comply with government Energy Star codes.
Case study: London Underground
London Underground has a company-wide initiative to reduce power consumption which applies just as much to the IT department as it does to the staff working at the stations and on the trains.
David Sterry, infrastructure architect at London Underground, is in charge of a 4,500 PC estate. When he started the energy-saving strategy, the estate was 3,500 strong and he reckons that using Nightwatchman saved the company £170,000 a year. With the increased population of PCs, this figure will approach £200,000.
Apart from the savings in power, Nightwatchman has also improved time management. Sterry said, "We use Microsoft Systems Management Server to do roll-outs and we have had problems in the past when users switched off their machines despite being asked not to. Using Wake-on-Lan has improved our efficiency because we do not have to go out and track down offending machines."
PCs in London Underground stations have to run 24 hours a day for safety reasons. Sterry is considering replacing these with Wyse Technology's thin clients because of their lower power requirements compared to PCs.
He also expects to make more savings by choosing energy-efficient equipment wherever possible. Printers will be one area where newer low-power alternatives will be introduced. The company is also rolling out Windows XP and will be teaching users the basics of energy efficiency as part of a training course.
