Computer firms wake up to problem of always-on PCs

Energy saving software for turning on and off unused PCs is getting better but is it time these tools were tied into more sophisticated IT management systems

With concerns about soaring energy bills and carbon footprints mounting computer vendors have spent much of the last year talking about power management issues in the data centre, but what about using less power at the desktop?

Thanks to multi-core processors, which rely on processing instructions in parallel, chip vendors don't have to rely on pushing electricity through the CPU as quickly as possible to increase performance. Consequently, today's processors consume less power than they did before, and combined with other power saving developments such as LCD monitors, they are driving down desktop power consumption in general.
But nevertheless, companies could still save energy by powering down PCs more frequently when they are not being used and PC vendors are starting to realise this. HP recently shipped a selection of new PCs including the dc7800, a revised version of its Ultra Slim model, which is already designed as a small form factor, low-power unit. The company includes software from Seattle-based Verdiem with the system. Called Surveyor, it is a power management toolkit designed to put a computer to sleep in preset time windows administered from a central console.

Unfortunately, HP hasn't integrated the software into its own systems management software yet, meaning that companies using clients and systems management software from the same vendor won't have an end-to-end view of Verdiem's power management through its Openview software.

Verdiem says that using its software effectively can save between 5 to 15 per cent of your company's energy consumption. If power management at the desktop is really that important, and if vendors such as HP are starting to bundle it out of the box, how important is it that such systems integrate effectively with existing systems management software?

Some sort of back-end control is necessary, argues Sumir Karayi, CEO of UK-based 1E. Karayi sells a rival to Surveyor called NightWatchman, which also imposes power management on desktop machines. There are three stakeholders that companies like his need to keep happy, he says: the person who pays the company's energy bills (who wants to pay less), the users, (who want to do their jobs with as little fuss as possible), and the IT department, which has to keep everything running smoothly.

"Their job is to patch machines, update them, and ensure that they are working," he says, adding that if they can't do that effectively because the machines are powered down, they'll simply tell all the users to keep their machines switched on. "In that sense, systems management integration is vital."

There are two aspects to systems management in the context of managing desktop power consumption, says Karayi. The first is deploying and controlling the power management functionality from a central point to minimise your workload, and the second is reporting, so that you can see what the PCs are doing, and how much power you are saving. "We made Nightwatchman agnostic of systems management, because both of the features were built into our SMS Wakeup product," he says.

SMS Wakeup works in synchronisation with Microsoft's Systems Management Server, waking up PCs so that SMS can send them updates, for example. Likewise, Verdiem supports Systems Management Server, but hasn't announced integration with any of the broad systems management frameworks sold by firms like HP, CA, or IBM. This isn't really systems management agnosticism -- it's Microsoft-centric systems management integration. Great for all-MS shops, but less useful for those firms that bought into expensive systems management frameworks from the likes of IBM and HP (neither of whom responded to our questions about integrating power management features in their systems management frameworks).

"Systems management is all about making machines available, so what systems management needs is really Wake On LAN," says Karayi. Wake On LAN was Intel's original solution for waking sleeping PCs up remotely that was shipped almost ten years ago. It used the standby well of the power supply to keep the network control running and listening for what David Hollway, technical marketing engineer at Intel, calls a "magic packet" on the network.

There were limitations, however. There was no feedback mechanism to see if the PC really was powered up, so you'd have to wait a few minutes until a local network management agent would contact the central systems management software to let it know that the PC was awake. Moreover, the magic packet wasn't routable, meaning that you couldn't wake individual PCs up across multiple network segments.
When Intel moved away from its NetBurst architecture to its current Core generation of processors, the company moved to tackle some of these problems by shipping new active management technology (AMT). Under this system, both the network control and the microcontroller remained juiced up, even when the machine is in sleep mode.

"With AMT, we have a complete network stack running on the controller, so that it can listen for a variety of commands," Hollway explains. "In many cases it doesn't even have to turn on the host PC to respond." A central server could ask a PC about its hardware configuration for asset management purposes, for example, and essentially have the computer mumble the correct response in its sleep.

Systems management software taking advantage of AMT can therefore do more work on the IT department's behalf without having to wake up large numbers of machines and consume power needlessly. It also makes it easier to wake up machines remotely when more significant configuration changes are needed. But it doesn't remove the need for dedicated power management software, according to Verdiem. "Surveyor allows measurement and monitoring of power states and device usage, the ability to schedule varying power policies to be enforced at different times, and the ability to still place computers into standby when the standard Windows Sleep Timer fails to do so (which is quite common)," said a spokesperson.

Ideally, IT departments could do this using active directory group policy and some scripts, but that still isn't good enough for Karayi. "Group policy can be a little dumb," he argues. "It's good for some settings that can be applied across organisations, such as putting your company name into the registry somewhere or imposing security settings. But it has no method of interacting with the user." If you are in the habit of giving presentations and talking at length in between each slide, for example, and group policy powers off your screen after five minutes, you may want to change that setting, but it won't let you, he says.

Word has it that HP will have integrated Verdiem into its system within a year. For the time being, however, IT departments keen to solve the power-sapping, carbon-emitting problem of always-on PCs have to rely on the home-baked reporting and management consoles from vendors like Verdiem and 1E and rely on their SMS support. If you want the benefits that this client-side software brings, such as automatically shutting down open applications so that users don't lose their data, that is a small price to pay.