Surveyor PC Power Management 1 - Savings

Issue:
Turn off workstations to save money and save the earth, be able to backup files on computers at night.

Quick:
Verdiem Surveyor Software to centrally manage and schedule PC power schemes.
Perl Script to wake computers for nightly backups

Visual/Learning:
Our computers currently stay on all the time because of the need to do remote administration and due to nightly backups of Outlook pst files on workstations. At the same time we want to be "green" and shutdown workstations in the off hours. So how do we do both?

Software from Verdiem called Surveyor provided the answer. In the next few posts I will go over the software and how we have it configured.

Verdiem Corporation - http://www.verdiem.com/- Toll Free (866) VERDIEM (837-3436) or sales@verdiem.com

They do not sell direct so after you call them they will direct you to a reseller.

Pricing is about $25 to $35 per computer. Our power company offers $15 rebate so your final cost could be between $10 - $20 per computer.

We projected our saving by first measuring the power used by our typical workstation using a power meter. The one we used was the "Kill A Watt EZ". You can get it for about $50.

We pay about .13 per kilowatt

From the meter we measured that we use 140 watts per computer/monitor.


We leave our PCs on all the time so:

140 x 24 hours x 365 days = 1,226,400 watts or 1,226 kilowatts per year. Times 13 cents is about $160 per year.


By turning PCs off for 12 hours on weekdays and 48 hours on weekends we save: 12 x 5 days + 48 = 108 hours per week x 52 weeks x 140 watts = 786 kilowatts or $102 /year savings.


62% savings not bad!

Due to the power we save along with the rebates offered by our local power company (PG&E) for purchasing the software, we project that the software will pay for itself (in our case) in less then 4 months.

Surveyor works by installing a client on the workstation and managing all the systems from a central server. The software does not load down the server very much so we ran it off of our Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), plus it already had SQL Server 2005 running.


The server requirements for up to 3,000 users:
Just about any OS - Windows 2000 Pro, XP pro, 2000 server, 2003 server.
Hardware Recommended - 2 GHZ P4, 1GB RAM, 10GB free disk space,

Software:
Microsoft Data Access Component (MDAC) version 2.8 (provided on Surveyor CD)
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (provided with Surveyor software as well)


Product scales up to 50,000 clients per server for those of you who have lots of clients.

Go To PC Power Management 2