As electricity prices in Sydney rise, organisations are looking at ways to reduce their overheads. Unfortunately there are factors that hinder a successful green policy in turning the workstation off, or switching into sleep mode on a nightly basis. Varidan has found that generally workstations are turned off over the weekends, but not always.
Some of the hindering factors are:
- Workstations require weekly and sometimes daily maintenance patches, antivirus signatures and general performance enhancements to keep them in optimal condition. These processes tend to run on a nightly basis so there is limited impact on the workstation.
- Human interaction is required to turn off a workstation, we all know humans are ultimately flawed. We are forgetful, this is probably why we see many workstations left turned on over a weekend even when a organisation has a shutdown weekend policy.
- The occasional need for technical support staff to access workstations out of hours to install an application, or run maintenance related tasks.
- The need to let a process run just before the user needs to leave the office, such as to print a 50 page document or backup data to a external hard drive.
Varidan, in conjunction with our agent software, has always had the ability to set policies to turn off or switch workstations into sleep mode. The issue has been how to switch the workstation on again. Some people may be aware of WOL (wake on lan). WOL was never truly successful due to the differing standards of network manufacturers, with some of the factors described above ‘hit and miss’ has never been a successful outcome for Varidan IT Managed Services.
So what is Intel VPro
This is a excerpt from the Intel website vPro Page
“Managing and protecting desktops and laptops and securing data are among the great challenges for modern businesses. The 2nd generation Intel® Core™ vPro™ processor family with the hardware-based security and manageability of Intel® vPro™ technology1 simplifies and accelerates these critical IT functions.”
In layman terms, Intel vPro is a extra component built into the workstation’s CPU to access base functions remotely. Functions such as Soft Boot, BIOS corrections and other low level functionality such as boot CD’s.
So how does vPro reduce electricity overheads
Combined with the Varidan agent software and a discussed green policy, Varidan could implement automatic green polices that turn the workstation off, or place it into sleep mode. As patches, or maintenance become a necessity, the Varidan agent will wake the workstation, execute the required work and then send the workstation back to sleep. In some organisations this could reduce workstation operation hours in half, which would be a good percentage of the organisation’s electricity bill.
How do I get vPro
As described above vPro is a CPU enhancement, which means the best way to obtain vPro is with the purchase of a new workstation. The vPro chips generally are $150-$250 more expensive, however you should see this returned in savings and more over the lifetime of the workstation. In conjunction with the organisation purchasing policy this could be done at an individual level, or as a complete organisational upgrade of its infrastructure.
The vPro workstations tend to be released only in the the mid to high range desktops and laptops. Lenovo has released the M91 workstation price tagged at $1420 ex GST with vPro, the non vPro M81 version the M81 has a sale figure at $1250 ex GST.
If this is an option that your organisation wishes to explore feel free to give us a call or e-mail us for further information.
Note: When using the term ‘workstation’ in this post, it is to describe PC based desktops and notebooks.
Author: Adam Sheridan
Further Reading
http://www.pcmall.com/n/customPages-2593?source=PWB23829
http://http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/vpro/vpro-technology-general.html