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Power Businesses The Almighty Buck IT

Why IT Won't Power Down PCs 576


Why IT Won't Power Down PCs

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  • by Critical Facilities (850111) * on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:46PM (#27600981) Homepage
    I worked as head of Critical Factilities Engineering for a major financial services provider with a 1 MM sq ft campus. There were just over 4000 employees on the campus, each one with at least 1 computer at his/her office/cube. After having a very expensive energy audit performed, a potential savings was (big surprise) shutting down PCs.

    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 themselves!

    No, I'm not kidding.
  • by RobertB-DC (622190) * on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:49PM (#27601031) Homepage Journal

    99% of the time, if I'm not sitting in front of it reading Slashdot, my work PC is merrily chugging along folding proteins [] 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.

  • Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SatanicPuppy (611928) * <Satanicpuppy&gmail,com> on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:49PM (#27601045) Journal

    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.

  • by Nos. (179609) <> on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:53PM (#27601117) Homepage

    The company I work for encourages all employees to shutdown their PCs at the end of the day. Once in a while they'll do a walk through at night and leave little reminders on any PCs they find still turned on.

    There are some issues. For example, we use wake on LAN so that SMS can push patches during the night, but we don't have a way to go back and turn them off (some solutions are being looked at). As well, some IT personnel need to remote access to their desktop machines. A way to send a WOL packet to the machine at the initialization of the remote access session is also being looked at.

    Generally though, it works well, though I haven't seen any stats on any savings. I think for most businesses, just this simple practice could realize significant savings though.

  • Another excuse (Score:3, Interesting)

    by meerling (1487879) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:55PM (#27601169)
    There are a number of admins out there that won't power down any server even if it's the only way to fix a problem that's trashing their files and network.
    Sometimes it's because they don't 'have the authority' to down the machines.
    Other times it's because they get unrealistic bonuses for unbroken uptime, and they are greed cretins who'd rather see their work go down the tubes for money.

    I know that it's rarely an issue with downing non-servers, and most admins are responsible as well as being the rarely disputed managers of their boxes, but there are way too many fools and scum.

    If you're curious, yes, I've dealt with a large number of those two types I just listed. They have no pride in their work, and give all admins a bad name. But that's all fodder for a different rant.
  • by Twillerror (536681) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:55PM (#27601171) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • by mediis (952323) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:58PM (#27601219)

    ... and thus could not be moved. So IT powered everything where they wanted to make a squatters claim to data center floor space. My favorite example was an SGI Challenge, we hadn't used SGI in 3 years, let alone the Challenge. The only thing plugged into this thing was power, no other cables of any type.

  • I blame Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)

    by snsh (968808) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @02:59PM (#27601239)
    Nothing built into XP, Vista, or Group Policy supports time-of-day power management. Many cases the user never wants their PC to sleep/hibernate from 9-5, but after 7 it's fair game. Microsoft doesn't address such a situation. It's either all-or-nothing. The alternative is to spend a lot of time/money acquiring some 3rd party tool like Verdiem, but buying an enterprise tool, versus enabling a feature you already have, means most people won't do it.
  • by yope (656090) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:04PM (#27601347)
    Leaving PC's on when they are not used is most probably a terrible waste, but I suspect that numbers about losses due to this are probably not very accurate. At least I have never seen evidence that those calculations take into account the simple fact that energy never dissapears, it only changes nature:

    This way unused PC's basically transform electrical energy into heat... with 100% efficiency (!). In many parts of the world however, during important parts of the year, heating is necessary. Heating costs a certain amount of energy, whether it comes from burning gas or oil directly or from electricity is just a matter of a difference in price (heat generated from electricity is probably more expensive). Of course you'd say that leaving the heating on during the night in a building that is only used during the day is also a waste, but take into consideration that (big) buildings do have quite a considerable thermal mass, so if you keep it warmer over night, the next day you still need less energy to heat it up again.

    Conclusion: when the heating is actively used, leaving your PC (or light-bulb, stand-by transformer or whatever) on when not used, will still save you money on the gas bill (but cost you more on electricity of course). The overall balance is still for a loss of course, but in some situations, a significantly smaller loss than many people tend to think.

    The same idea is true for energy saving light bulbs, btw, but that's for a different discussion.
  • Re:Remote Access ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by qoncept (599709) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:07PM (#27601385) Homepage
    Yeah, I gave a possible solution to the problem instead of answering the question. Shame on me.

    Q: How do I eat spaghetti with a spoon?
    A: Use a fork.

    It works on a level for saving electricity, but the major driving factor here was business continuity and disaster recovery. If the building burns down 3000 people can work from home. If your building burns down, everyone is shit out of luck.
  • by contrapunctus (907549) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:08PM (#27601417)
    I wonder how much energy would be saved if Microsoft puts out a patch that forces monitors to shut down. I apologize for being ignorant on the subject. I always see winxp computers in computer labs with the XP logo screensavers going on indefinitely (I'm assuming the maintainers/admins are to blame). But if they were set by default to suspend the monitors and the admins don't do anything, a lot of energy could be saved.
  • by bcrowell (177657) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:10PM (#27601439) Homepage

    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 [], 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.

  • by Maxo-Texas (864189) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:16PM (#27601539)


    What is the cost of 4000 employees for 5 minutes of lost productivity?

    If you are paying your employees only $800 a week, that's $100 a day, or $12 per hour, or a measly dollar lost $1.

    So your cost is only $4,000 per day.

    For 200 work days per year that would only be $800,000 in lost productivity.

    To save $75,000.

    Of course, most IT employees make a little bit over $800 a week.

  • by ooomphlaa (1097853) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:24PM (#27601653)
    There are many reasons why an IT Department might not elect, or have the ability, to power down or enable power management capabilities of computers. For example one of my environments is used 70-80% of the day and the only time I have to run updates and daily tasks is at night, which leave me almost an intangible window for powering down my machines. And I completely agree with those of you who said not to lay this on the IT Department b/c you are right. Often times we do not have the authority in our organizations to make that decision or our specific environment does not allow for any down time.
  • by Kamokazi (1080091) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:29PM (#27601713)

    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 ."


    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...)?

  • Re:Remote Access ... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:33PM (#27601803)


    Remote access to individual desktop machines is bad on so many levels:
    -It encourages storage of data locally instead of on network shares where it can be secured and backed up.
    -It is a nasty vector for malware.
    -It is an excuse to waste power (by leaving the PC on all the time).

    Just set up a server for remote desktop in virtual machines. Set up web-mail access for people who just need to check their e-mail.

    Its not that hard guys.

  • Simple (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Locke2005 (849178) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:36PM (#27601841)
    We've been explicitly told by our IT department NOT to turn off our PCs, so that they can run backups on them while we're not there. I suspect this is true at many companies. The best you can do is set up power management to automatically shut off the video and hard drive after a suitable idle period. I guess they don't trust "Wake On LAN" to wake the machine up for backups. It also makes it easier for IT to do an automated audit or inventory of what is on the LAN if none of them are ever turned off. With the dickless Sun workstations we used to have, the argument was made that wear and tear on the machines from power cycling them costs more than the energy savings from shutting them off when not in use.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:38PM (#27601879)

    In a number of the companies I've worked at, the main reason PCs and monitors are not turned off is simply apathy.

    I'm an electronics engineer (and a programmer), so I've tried to encourage people to turn their machines off for about 20 years (originally due to the fire hazard risk as much as wasted power, as I have seen how Thermal Runaway etc.. can cause fires. (While fault finding, I've watched fires happen in front of me)). People don't want to hear either fire hazard or power wastage. It wasn't until we had one PC monitor catch fire in one company during the lunch hour (thankfully we were able to catch it in time), but anyway after that at least the machines in that company were turned off. But usually its simply too much hassle to wait 3 or 4 minutes for the machine to boot up in the mornings or turn off at night or they forget to turn them off at night, etc.. etc... Over the years I've even tried to ask around to workout why so many machines are left on. What I keep finding is that ultimately, the answer is simply apathy. Its to much trouble and they have other more important things to think about.

    Maybe training could help the situation, like for example make people watch videos of machines catching fire etc.. but I doubt it would work effectively. I think what is needed is for all PCs to by default, logout and power down after an extended period of inactivity, with a setting allowing this default setting to be overridden on the few machines we do need on all the time. Power down needs to be totally off so no power is drawn and the same for monitors and other equipment. (Any form of standby power is a huge waste of power around the world, so it needs to aways be totally off).

  • by MpVpRb (1423381) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:40PM (#27601923)

    What's the need for "power management software"

    Users have a finger.

    The computer has a button.

    How hard can it be to push the damn button?

  • by wsanders (114993) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:44PM (#27601995) Homepage

    ... 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.

  • by Markus_UW (892365) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @03:53PM (#27602157)
    That's a pretty common government thing to do... When I used to work for Environment Canada, we used to spend like insanity when it came up to budget time, just so we wouldn't lose that budget room should we need it in a future year. It (and a few other things that I won't discuss now) actually sickened me to the point where I had to leave government employment and join the corporate world oncemore, which while not perfect is a little bit more sane, where success and competence are somewhat more linked.
  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @04:03PM (#27602361) Journal
    All too often, WOL is AWOL.

    My department is, actually, working on a project in this vein right now. WOL has been annoyingly unhelpful. If the machine is turned off it often works(assuming the BIOS is configured correctly, not bugged, the system isn't using an add-on NIC without a WOL cable connected to the motherboard, etc.). When systems go into S1 or S3, WOLing them seems to be a fantasy.

    I was really surprised, actually. I had expected a "Well, just make them sleep on idle, and shut down in the evening, and make it work with existing systems" project to be a cakewalk. It isn't. XP's power management settings are fairly pathological at any scale beyond single machines(Why yes, even in a network environment with unpriviged users, power management settings are per user. Of course, if the mouse is configured to wake a machine from S3 and the user unplugs it and plugs it back into a different port it will lose that setting. Why not?) and the degree to which S1, S3, hibernation, WOL and so forth work varies sharply between models, sometimes even between BIOS versions. Add on complaints from users who like to leave unsaved documents open when they go home for the night, admins who like pushing patches and AV when users aren't around, and the whole thing is a bit of a mess.
  • by bemymonkey (1244086) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @04:04PM (#27602397)

    Not particularly reliable in my experience... A few of my setups just won't respond to a magic packet every now and then - reboot, suspend, try again, and it works fine. It's definitely not reliable enough to bet your career on it...

  • by TheRaven64 (641858) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @04:06PM (#27602445) Journal
    You can't send wake on LAN packets across the Internet because the Internet is not a LAN. WOL packets are Ethernet frames, not IP packets. They will not be routed because nothing high enough up the protocol stack to handle routing ever sees them. That said, there's nothing stopping you from having a machine in each LAN segment that is always on and provides a web UI for starting machines by sending a WOL packet.
  • by RollingThunder (88952) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @04:07PM (#27602449)

    Exactly. You want complaints, you start making the person's PC defrag and patch while they're trying to work.

    Of course, nothing sucks quite so bad as being the poor bastard working the nightshift when all that crap kicks off via domain policies, and you can't abort them.


  • by dazedNconfuzed (154242) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @04:15PM (#27602557)

    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.)

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16, 2009 @04:22PM (#27602663)

    This is exactly what happened at my company in regards to "Green IT".

    Previously, we were allowed to use personal assets for VPN access, so could do work from home even if we did not have a company laptop.

    This was changed to use this rather strange web-based system that allowed us to access:
    1) Intranet websites
    2) Remote desktop to our desk PCs

    So if you wanted to do anything that was not offered by the Intranet system, you had to VPN into your desktop PC (when you could previously just use your local machine).

    At the same time the policy was instituted that would effectively force users to keep their desktops turned on, our IT started talking about "Green IT".


  • by Eil (82413) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @04:49PM (#27603149) Homepage Journal

    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 might as well replace "in that state" with "in the entire U.S. governmental system". When I was in the Air Force, our squadron commander would come around to all the avionics shops in October (just before the end of the fiscal year) and tell us that we had to spend X thousand dollars on new test equipment, furniture, floor wax, or whatever. Anything, whether we actually needed the items or not. (This was how we got our ping-pong table one year.)

    What made me angry was that we really needed new desktop computers more than anything else, but of course we couldn't because anything that looked, sounded, or smelled like a computer was completely under the control of the I.T. staff. (Funny how they got brand-new machines every 6 months but our shop never got a single upgrade in the whole 4 years I was there.)

  • OS X Machines (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Windows Breaker G4 (939734) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @05:29PM (#27603815) Homepage Journal

    I run 5 mac labs and while I schedule my machines to start up and shut down everyday (off completely on weekends), I do NOT allow my machines to sleep for a very good reason. If I allow them to sleep, os x when used in a server and remote home folder environment (os x server) will tend to freak out when it wakes up especially if someone is still logged in. I've seen machines beachball for minutes before it finally figures out what is going on.

    I am planning on not turning my machines off at all soon, this is because I am going to start running folding at home on all of my lab machines when they are idle. I figure the lack of off time is warranted by the fact that I am contributing to the scientific community.

    Also, the school is going to start installing SW (bigfix []) on machines that will allow them to track how and where power is used. Then they want to tweek settings so they can show how much power they have saved. What this means for me, is I need to waste as much power as I can during these trials so I can continue running machines how I want to and still show savings. Seems silly but those are the hoops i suppose.

  • by Glyphn (652286) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @05:36PM (#27603915)

    In many companies, you would be darn near shot for asking if you can access your PC from home. Besides, what do you need off your PC? Your data should not be on the pc, it should be sitting on a server, where it can be properly secured. That's what VPN's and terminal servers are for..

    /shrug. Data on server, yes; application on PC server, generally no. And it's funny, really. I've worked in a research environment where PCs were used as analytical instruments and, yes, we had users VPN'ing into the network and remote accessing their PCs to check on jobs at night to make sure they were still executing, and I had to deal with IT about this and single PC policies, etc. and after getting a bunch of push-back, I said, no problemo -- let me describe the needs of my department and you tell me how you want to solve them. And I worked with a couple of nice IT reps and they devised a server with various VM environments where we could run our long computationally intensive jobs, and I helped build the business case, etc. and at the end of the day, hey, it turned out they didn't have the budget and they decided to leave things the way they were.

    Which is fine. My position is simply that IT shouldn't whine about atypical user behavior patterns unless/until they are ready to address their underlying business needs . . . which, frankly, IT is often ignorant of or indifferent towards.

    Updates should NOT be run at night, because then the machines never get rebooted to actually activate the updates (unless you tell them to reboot even if the user is logged in, which ruins the "running a simulation all night" thing)

    Yeah, I love policies like this. I'll be setting in some seminar and in the middle of the speaker's presentation there will be a forced reboot after a background install. Lovely. Convenient for IT, yes. Inconvenient for the audience of 100+ who get to wait through a 5 minute restart. Or, hah, I'll turn on my PC at the beginning of the day and run through the ungodly boot times imposed by who knows how much crap that's been layered on by IT, followed by the obligatory virus scan, installs, reboots etc. Some days, it's 30 minutes to an hour before I can get to work. Of course IT doesn't mind about stuff like this because opportunity cost is unmeasured and in any case doesn't hit their books. For all the processes I had to deal with in a large corporate environment, I never saw a full requirements analysis run before IT rolled out a policy, or an impact analysis afterwords. Lesson learned: IT cares about IT and not much else.

    But life is good. I'm in a smaller company now, the IT people actually care if projects and work are getting done, and the users try not to make life miserable for IT (and sometimes succeed) -- so much more comfortable than having to fight IT day by day just to do the work I was hired to do.

  • Waste of time (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall (25149) on Thursday April 16, 2009 @06:39PM (#27604661)

    My morning routine:

    Work (and perhaps nibble while doing so).

    You want to talk about savings to a company, lets talk about every person in the company waiting for a PC to boot. Not everyone gets coffee/tea. You also discounted all the time when you got back to work, that you are restarting apps and positioning windows.... again multiply that by each and every person, are you really saving money or have you just lost a shitload of manhours down the hole never to be seen again?

    If a company could power off PC's at night, and have them ready by the time you returned with apps opened and positioned just as you left them - then I could see it saving money. Otherwise it's at best a loss and likely a wash (given as I said a more realistic 15-30 minute startup time including scripts and relaunches).

  • by gknoy (899301) <gknoy AT anasazisystems DOT com> on Thursday April 16, 2009 @07:14PM (#27605035)

    I find my productivity improves when I sit down at my workstation and have everything already open and ready to use: My code editor, my code runtime, any models, spreadsheets, and reference resources that I have open. Normally, I would just Hibernate at the end of the day, and restart in the morning.

    However, a key portion of my work environment requires a license from a license server; if I am offline, I lose the license, and nearly everything I have been working on dies irretrievably. If it took me only 5 minutes to get situated in the morning, that's 25 hours of my time wasted setting up my work environment over the course of a year. 25 hours of most professionals' salaries (at places that are large enough that computed power is a notable expense) is more than the savings in power.

    Then there's the extra issue that I can't remotely access my machine on the weekend or some morning if necessary... but the main one for me is keeping my work environment set up.

  • by complete loony (663508) <{Jeremy.Lakeman} {at} {}> on Thursday April 16, 2009 @10:10PM (#27606657)
    A better answer would be to send a wake on lan packet when I swipe my security card at the front door. Then it doesn't matter when I walk in the building.
