Do Any Companies Power Down at Night? 646
An anonymous reader writes "My Health Sciences Campus has about 8,000 desktop computers, and on any given night about half of them are left on. I know this because I track all the MAC addresses in case there is a virus outbreak. Aside from the current fad of 'being green', has anyone had any success in encouraging users to power-down at night? You could potentially eliminate running bots, protect yourself from the next virus outbreak, keep your data safe, etc. Do security concerns and power consumption issues matter enough to do this?"
Aside from being green... (Score:2, Insightful)
And improved employee morale could result as well, since what would be the point of working late?
Easy fix (Score:1, Insightful)
Common wisdom (Score:2, Insightful)
Common wisdom (which may or may not be actual wisdom) suggests that powering up/down of computer power supplies is one of the largest sources of "wear" on computers nowadays, and so it's best to avoid that (replacing system components and increased costs in the industries to make this possible should be factored into eco-costs as well). Having systems go to sleep to various degrees presumably gets one much of the way towards being more eco-friendly without so much of this wear. That said, presumably a rigourous analysis on the topic would provide more reliable guidance.
Hibernate (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, there is no reason NOT to use the power management settings built into the OS.
Re:Aside from being green... (Score:5, Insightful)
Increased probability of HDD failure (Score:2, Insightful)
We have power down at night policy (Score:5, Insightful)
It took about 6 months before we were at a realistic level. We have 633 desktops on our site so there is normally always a valid reason for one or two to be left on (valid reasons being batch copy, verify or processing of files). For those interested we have had a reduction in the amount of equipment failure (HDD mainly) as well as pretty good cost savings for power. Not to mention running greener (which regardless of if you believe in global warming or not is good).
Power vs. operational (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to leave the computer on overnight, but with things like monitor power-down and CPU idling enabled. When it's not doing anything it drops about 90% of it's power consumption after 15 minutes, and even when working with the monitor off (eg. running the nightly backup) it's still running at less than 50% of full power. If I power it off, by comparison, it can't run it's virus scan, backup, update check and the like overnight and has to do those things while I'm trying to use it during the day. Plus there's wear and tear to consider, I've noticed that the office computers that get turned off and on every day tend to fail and need replacing several times before mine (that stays on all the time) has a failure.
So my preference is to leave computers running but with power-saving features set to minimize power without shutting things down. This means hard drives continue to spin but the CPU goes into low-power idle mode. The monitor goes to suspend mode (beam and deflection power is off but the circuits and coils are kept warm), not powered-down completely. That seems to be the best balance between reducing power consumption, allowing it to run maintenance operations overnight and minimizing wear and tear and thermal stress on the components. If management absolutely insists on ignoring those last two in favor of the first, wake-on-LAN is essential to allow nightly maintenance to happen.
Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdown (Score:1, Insightful)
I used to turn my machine off at night ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why power down? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reducing energy consumption isn't just about saving money, it's about not fucking up the planet too.
Re:Aside from being green... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Common wisdom (Score:5, Insightful)
1: Power-cycling actually reduces the MTBF opposed to just leaving it on.
2: The reduced MTBF is lower than your company intends to keep the asset.
3: Cost-savings from the "increased" MTBF by leaving it on is greater than the electricity (+ increased A/C cost) cost to run those 300W power supplies all the time.
Of the ~6 computers I've had to failure, they all lasted far longer than even a five-year technology plan, AND did not fail due to simple wear and tear on the circuits. My anecdote isn't data, but it does make me question your conventional wisdom. (Especially since those PCs I know that are left on all the time don't have a significantly increased lifespan.)
Re:We power down at weekends (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely you could use wake on lan to wake the machines then do your rollout 10 minutes later? Or do a patch install when the machine is turned on and connects to the domain controller?
In windows I'm sure you can set the time between warning appearing and shutdown ocuring. Give 600 seconds warning and you could probably shutdown 90% of the machines overnight.
What is so discusting about bing green. (Score:2, Insightful)
Remote access (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose if you could find a way to remotely hibernate a computer and remotely unhibernate it then you could potentially save on the electric bill.
Re:Why power down? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdow (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest a simpler, low-tech solution - just stick up visible signs in the labs, and on some of the major office floors, asking people to shut down the computers in the evenings
Just the energy savings on that many computers would be not insignificant.
Re:Common wisdom (Score:2, Insightful)
So, keeping the computer on just to a avoid a possible wearing out of the physical parts really does not make much sense.
Re:We power down at weekends (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming that 100% of machines in use are doing something interactive (and therefore have someone sat at them). This is frequently not the case.
Re:workstations by day, cluster by night (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Aside from being green... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common wisdom (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why power down? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Easy fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Encouraging people to pull all nighters or work on weekends smacks of an inefficient workforce or ineffective management. The only times people should be working those hours are because a job sprang up last minute due to an act of god or because the work requires that it be done when people aren't around. And in those cases if you've got on sight IT, it shouldn't be that difficult to set up an arrangement to cope with that. If you're going to have work done nights and weekends anyway, you may as well just outsource things to another timezone, and that's frequently a cost saving thing anyways.
Re:Power vs. operational (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of turning off a machine is an old and out of date idea. Power management build into machines is now quite good. Another consideration is that commercial machines, at least, hit a central server on startup, and if everyone turns on the machine at 8:00, that can be quite a number of hits. Just everyone hitting the email server at once is a pain. Then there is the issue of updates, indexing and the like.
I can see how turning off some machines might be a significant power saving off the sleep option. I have, for instance, notice that my laptop PC will drain the batteries if left unused for a week or so, while my powermac will not. This indicates that the PC draws significant power when asleep, and is in fact a power hog. But, if machines are designed to energy star standards, I do not see how turning them off every night would save significant amounts of power.
Re:Easy fix (Score:3, Insightful)
No, a properly managed company would allow users to work when they want to the greatest extent possible. Don't assume that everyone prefers the same hours you do.
And for most positions, there's no need to make each physical box remotely accessible to allow people to work whenever and wherever they like, just a remote home directory for each user.
Back on topic, I think users can be given some input; the key is to make them think about the issue. Run a script that asks each user when his or her PC should shut off for the night. Then, if the PC has been idle for less than 5 minutes at that shutoff time, wait another half hour. This way, the guy who is most productive working from 2 p.m. until midnight can still save energy by having his computer turn off at 2 a.m.
Re:Common wisdom (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Power vs. operational (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, for the love of god, get an LCD. Modern LCDs are leaps and bounds better than CRTs in every way, especially power consumption. And they're dirt cheap too.
rite aid (Score:2, Insightful)
They say its to help deter someone from breaking into the store and trying to steal stuff.....which im sure if you did the numbers would actually cost the company more to leave everything on, than to have a theft every once in a while....
Do lights really stop break-ins?
Re:Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power vs. operational (Score:4, Insightful)
So long as that CRT still works, it's better for the environment just to keep using it. The added electricity usage is far less than the energy and environmental costs of properly disposing of that CRT monitor, not to mention the environmental and energy costs of producing the replacement LCD.
Re:Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdow (Score:2, Insightful)
Also I don't think signs will have anywhere near the impact you imagine. We can't even get users to not eat around the machines.
It's not about trees. (Score:-1, Insightful)
[won't power down because electricity is cheap and] Sorry, i'm not a treehugger.
It's about not having to waste money and lives conquering oil rich nations and not fucking up the climate in ways that will really cost you. More US citizens have died in Iraq than died on 9/11. The US invasion purposely and accidently killed more than 600,000 Iraq citizens and turned millions more into refugees. Large parts of the US are suffering the worst droughts since the dust bowl. Tropical disseases are already encroaching into the US. Wasteful policies are short sighted and stupid.
Uh, Sleep Mode - shutdown? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uh, Sleep Mode - shutdown? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Preventing Infection? (Score:3, Insightful)
Every power or network outage and mandatory-reboot Windows update, even overnight, usually causes major cursing across the office.
Re:Aside from being green... (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine if even 5% of computers in the US did this, we'd drop our carbon footprint drastically.
Re:Aside from being green... Just let them stay on (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever jump-started a car? Did you not notice how when you connect jumper cables to the vehicle with the dead battery, the running car has its engine get slogged down by the extra load? And does it not stand to reason that if you want to hold the engine at the same RPM (as an electric utility has to do to hold line frequency) you have to feed the engine more gas to do so?
If you draw more power out of a circuit, somewhere, more power has to be put in.
Peak load is why extra power plants need to be built. Sure, it is great to decrease that to prevent the extra emissions. But the loads at all times of the day and night should be reduced as well where possible.
Re:Power vs. operational (Score:4, Insightful)
Your point #1 is false, I'm afraid. Yes, the components were designed to work over a wide temperature range. The problem is the change. Gradual or not, components made of different materials expand and contract at different rates as temperature changes. As long as the temperature stays steady, regardless of what that steady temperature is, there's no problem. But if it's changing, even slowly, then the different materials want to change size relative to each other. That produces stress. You can see this in the thermostat that controls your home's heating and cooling. It's made of strips of 2 metals with drastically different thermal expansion ratios bonded together. As the temperature changes, the bimetallic strip physically warps. The same thing happens inside every chip and solder joint in your computer every time it warms up or cools down. And eventually those joins start to crack apart. That does two things. First, it increases the electrical resistance of the joint. Higher resistance = more heat. Second, it disrupts the thermal transfer from the chips themselves into their carriers by disrupting the tight physical contact between them. So now the chips aren't being cooled quite as well, and at the same time they're running hotter internally. All that turns into a shorter lifespan.
As for #2, not anymore. That surge effect's confined to the power supply itself. It still affects the PSU, but no worse than normal power-line noise will. The big effect is actually on the drive motors and bearings. Stopped, the bearings settle a bit. When the platters are spun up, it takes a moment for the bearings to lift up on their film of lubricant again. One cycle like that puts as much wear on the bearings as many hours of steady spinning. And the power cost of keeping a drive spinning is minimal. Think about spinning a wheel, which is all the drive's platters are. It takes a fair amount of effort to start a heavy wheel spinning and get it up to speed, but once it's going it takes very little effort to keep it spinning at that speed. It's enough on my large drives that I can actually see the spike in power draw at the wall socket when a drive is spun up from a dead stop.
When people comment about how their machines aren't having problems, I'm often a bit skeptical. I've had quite a few people ask me for help with a computer that "just started having problems a few days ago". When I throw my hardware diagnostic program at it, I get a veritable flood of red malfunction and error indications. On the last one, "Every now and then it won't boot, and occasionally a program dies for no reason." turned into having to replace the motherboard and all the RAM (every stick of memory had at least 2 bad columns, and the EIDE controller was fried and corrupting data during large DMA transfers) and restore the entire system from original media and backups (losing about 10% of the data in the process, the backups didn't go back far enough to contain uncorrupted copies of the files).
Re:viruses (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Create job to force automatic reboot or shutdow (Score:3, Insightful)
If I were a taxpayer in your district, I would appreciate the savings on the school's electric bill.
Re:Aside from being green... (Score:2, Insightful)