posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008 1:22 PM
Doug Washburn has a good post about PC power consumption that you could dump into the "Green IT" category.
It's not about saving power in the data center, it's about all of those desktops that are left running each night. And it's pretty accurate. Funny thing is that somewhere along the line, everyone stopped powering down on their way out the door.
BIG-IP LTM can help power down underutilized servers by distributing the load to other servers in the pool, but that would be a few high-power-consumption machines. Likely that won't touch the savings of thousands of turning off those running desktops each night. Of course it depends on company size, but that's a two or three minute investment for each employee at the end of the day, and according to Doug (quoting Energy Star estimates) the return is $25-75 per year per PC. Can't sneeze at that.
Just thought I'd pass it along. Saving that kind of money with a policy change is bantered about a lot, but rarely actually pans out. This one is so simple that it actually will save you money.
Don.
