Green IT power ready to go

Activating power management settings and tools can save costs now, says Nick Cavalancia

As companies look to go green, from adopting recycling policies to reducing paper consumption, power management should be a key component in their strategy.

Many software vendors are developing tools to help the IT department reduce its carbon footprint and energy costs. Over time, investment in eco-friendly initiatives will become necessary. However, these can take years of planning, and are costly to implement.

One of the easiest ways to lower energy costs, and directly influence a company’s energy bill, is to manage power use.

I believe many companies have not yet recognised the full benefits of centrally configuring Windows desktop power management.

Manually visiting each PC to ensure that it is turned off at the end of the day is time-consuming, there is no way to ensure consistency across the enterprise, and you cannot change the power management settings according to who logs onto a given machine.

Scripting comes with inherent problems: writing, testing and debugging prior to the release of a simple change, syntax errors and limited granularity. Maintenance of hand-coded scripts and utilities usually cost more than buying a third-party offering, in my opinion.

With some work, administrators can develop group policies to initiate power management. But filtering the type of power management policy that users receive and creating exceptions is difficult, and you cannot warn users before taking power management actions.

Power management capabilities on the desktop may allow administrators to easily create, modify or remove Windows power schemes, centralising control over laptops, desktops and servers.

Additionally, inactivity timers can lock, logoff, shutdown or restart the PC as needed.

IT administrators should be implementing greener initiatives that can offer immediate energy and cost savings, while thinking about long term, cost effective methods that will save money and reduce their carbon footprint in the future.

Customers should consider spending more in the short term to increase benefits and successes in the years to come.

Nick Cavalancia is vice president of Windows management at ScriptLogic