James D. Stallardblog

With the rising cost of fuel impacting everyone's bottom lines and the increasingly good PR to be had, one of my clients asked me to come up with a centrally controlled power management solution for their Windows XP estate of around 3500 machines.

According to a report prepared for the US Environmental Protection Agency "An organization can save $10 to $50 per computer annually by enabling power management features that place a computer monitor into a low-power “sleep” mode during periods of inactivity". In 2008, the US pays 5p per Kilowatt Hour on average, we pay almost double that at 9.5p (source: www.eia.doe.gov and www.uswitch.com), making the savings between £10 and £50 per monitor, per year give or take the exchange rate fluctuations.

Based on those figures, this represented savings of between £35,000 and £174,000 EVERY YEAR, just in power, just in monitors - not forgetting that those figures do not include the machines themselves and the savings in air-conditioning. Indeed, many businesses only require air conditioning to counter the heat created by all those machines and monitors being left fully powered up.

The big reason why Microsoft never implemented Power Management control via GPO is that GPOs are designed to deliver registry integer and string values and for some reason Power Management settings are held as binary values. This has meant that the only solution to date is a specialist application (and custom GPO template) that can perform the translation between GPO-based registry integer and string values, and the Operating System. It's a messy solution at best.

There is an application out there that does GPO based Power Management, but it requires the application to be installed on every machine and a poorly designed Group Policy template; and after testing it for my client I wasn't happy with the functionality or quality, or the number of times I had to reboot my machine after yet another a terminal Dr Watson failure. The only other solution I found is poorly written and requires a software deployment mechanism to get it beyond a limited pilot.

So, I designed and created a new solution.

The new solution is completely (and easily) centrally controllable by group membership and allows you to set as many different combinations of Power Management settings across your IT estate as you like (vastly more flexible than GPOs). The new solution allows you to centrally control Power Management on machines that are not logged on and for users after they log on. The new solution uses the built-in Windows XP APIs and applications to guarantee compatibility across all Windows XP Service Pack levels with no crashes or any unexpected behaviour. The new solution integrates totally into Active Directory on Windows 2000, 2003 and 2008 and is completely transparent to users. Although power management settings are, by default, only changeable by members of the local Administrators and Power Users Groups, a simple alteration can be made that allows this right for your non-priviledged users without further elevation or compromise of your security. A version that can handle Windows 2000 and Windows Vista will be available shortly.

How much is it?
. A one off consultancy fee to attend your site, install and configure it, and train your administrators. Two days is usually sufficient, more might be warranted in large enterprises with complex environments.
. A subscription fee based on a tiny percentage of the savings to be had, per seat, per year. Significant discounts are available for multi-year subscriptions and large numbers of users.

Please contact me at www.leafgrove.com or using the email link on this entry for more information and discounted pricing.