Buyers' Guide
Green control puts IT into the black
Published: 10 Jul 2008, 04:54pm
IT has a bad reputation for wasting power. More efficient chip designs are improving matters but the biggest green gains are coming from advances in remote management.
All over the world, computers are burning as much energy as the world's aeroplanes - and much of that energy is wasted.
With good management, our desktops and laptops could curb their thirst for power and be better citizens - and save us all money at the same time.
Stuart Dommett, enterprise client product manager at Intel says PCs are left running and used at a very low efficiency. "IT is responsible for about two per cent of the world's total emissions - and of that, the largest percentage is desktop PCs and peripherals," he says.
That's not just bad for the environment, it has become a major cost. By 2010, IT departments will be spending more on electricity than on hardware, according to Gartner.
So good management technology that cuts power use has a double benefit. "Powering-down saves real hard dollars - and it has a feel-good factor," says Dommett.
Good management is about efficiency. It saves money and it saves work. So tightening up IT management can have direct benefits in reducing greenhouse gas output and energy costs.
The latest Intel chips are more efficient, wasting less power. They also include vPro management, which has other benefits. "One area where vPro can provide an unexpected payback is to lower desktop power consumption," says analyst firm Gartner.
Some of the power-saving comes from better processors. New vPro systems consume less power than earlier systems, because the processor uses less power when idling - 8W instead of 22W - and the surrounding chipset uses half the power of its predecessor.
More importantly, in Gartner's view, is the fact that Intel has cracked the network issues that have made wake-on-LAN a non-starter for most of the past decade.
In the 1990s, Intel developed the concept of a desktop that could be turned off using a signal sent over the LAN but it was never a success - until now.
"vPro enables a secure and reliable remote-wakeup capability", says Gartner in a research note. "This capability enables organisations to place their PCs in a low-power state after hours but still have them reliably available for installing security fixes or other maintenance."
Security patches aren't optional. Systems that aren't patched are a liability but patching them manually is expensive and impractical. So patches have to be distributed automatically, and without wake-on-LAN the only way to make sure the patches arrive is to leave the systems turned on.
Plymouth University used to leave its PCs running 24 hours a day. To use less electricity and control its desktops, it has embarked on a refresh that will use vPro. Intel partner Viglen is replacing 5,000 machines, with Core 2 Duo systems, giving the university desktops it can turn off at night.
"Intel vPro technology allowed us to update and maintain our machines remotely," says Rob Douglass, desktop application manager at the University of Plymouth. "Even when powered down we will be able to wake them back up."
Plymouth's new desktops use 40 per cent less power than the ones they replaced, simply because of the improvements in their silicon. The university estimates it'll save another 25 per cent because desktops can be turned off when not in use.
German giant Siemens did its own study and found that, by allowing it to shut down its PCs for eight hours at night, vPro could save 1.28 kWh per PC per day, and $52.80 per PC per year. "This one feature alone saves the company $264,000 yearly [and] pays for the cost of adding Intel vPro processor technology," the company reported in its newsletter.
Gartner agrees, concluding that, even if users have to buy a third-party tool form a company like Verdiem or 1E Software, the power savings will pay for the tool and the cost of specifying vPro technology in less than a year.
But it doesn't end there - there are other ways good management can save energy. vPro allows IT staff to resolve faults remotely. If the PC can be connected to a network, then they can operate it - even if the operating system has failed.
This means that IT staff can make hands-on repairs to machines installed in remote site or at the far end of a campus, without leaving their desks. They can sort out laptops halfway round the world, and avoid the travel costs of getting to the PC, or of shipping the PC back to the office.
A fully green approach has to take into account the environmental cost of the systems being replaced during any upgrade.
Dumping old systems in landfill sites would remove some of the environmental benefit of moving to vPro - but it is becoming easier to hand old systems without any corporate data on them to companies that will distribute them to the developing countries or to charities.
That spreads the benefit of the upgrade even further.
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