Energy Camp tomorrow

Interop Las Vegas doesn't officially start until Tuesday, but I'll be there all day Monday attending and presenting at Energy Camp, a great new pre-conference intensive focused on helping IT departments not just participate in, but lead sustainability initiatives throughout their companies.

This is an "unconference" format, meaning lots of iterative schedule-building based on what the attendees want to know, learn and discuss in real-time.

I'm really looking forward to it, and will report back on topics, best practices and other highlights (from both Energy Camp and Interop in general) later in the week.

Events on the Horizon

Verdiem will be exhibiting at a couple shows in Las Vegas next week - we hope you'll be able to drop by our booths if you're in town.

Interop Las Vegas
Mandalay Bay Conference Center
Booth #2724
Tues-Thurs

Microsoft Management Summit
Venetian Hotel
Booth #421
Mon-Thurs

The Monster under My Desk

I've recently spent a little time measuring the power consumption of a significant number of computers. I'd like to share a little bit of the results.

The machine with the highest power consumption of the batch was a quad-core beast which drew 196 watts under full CPU load (171 watts while idle). The machine that drew the least was a brand new laptop with 44 watts under full load (33 idle).

While we shouldn't get hung up about specific machines and configurations at this point because my data set is still pretty small, I had some general impressions:

1. What you buy matters. Laptops are generally much more power efficient than desktops.


2. However, the difference in power savings between a laptop and desktop is still dwarfed by the laptop premium.


3. The performance of desktops can be much higher than laptops. Currently the top of the line Dell laptop is a 2.8Ghz Core 2 Duo. The top of the line "desktop" is a dual quad core running at 3.2Ghz.

Given these three factors, I suspect that many organizations will stick with desktop machines as a significant portion of their computer purchases despite the rising popularity of laptops.

For software engineers, like me, the difference in productivity and cost is large enough to keep us buying monster machines and pushing them under our desks. We just need to remember to turn them off.

CBS News TechTalk: Put Your Computer to Sleep

Check out Larry Magid's latest Tech Talk podcast featuring ways to make your PCs (and eventually many more networked devices) more energy efficient.

Larry points out that putting (and keeping) computers in sleep or stand-by mode when inactive isn't always as easy as it should be, and for businesses, there's an equal challenge of ensuring those computers can be "woken up" when they need to be in use again.

Check out Larry's extensive interview with Verdiem CEO Kevin Klustner here.

When Should I Turn Off My Computer?

Occasionally, people ask how long they have to be away from their machines to make turning it off worthwhile. From the perspective of energy savings, if you are going to be away from your computer from more than 8-15 minutes, you should turn it off. However, the energy concerns are only part of the equation.

To answer this question, we have to find the point at which the extra power consumption required to shut down and restart a machine is offset by the power saved. If the machine is off for any period of time longer than that, we've saved energy.

Modern computers use much more energy when they are doing work than when they are idle. So, to find the breakeven point, I started my typical set of applications: Firefox with a couple of tabs, Microsoft Word, a media player, and Visual Studio. Then, I measured the power consumption using a wattmeter while I shutdown the machine, waited for a little while, then turned the computer back on and restarted all the applications.

Here's a graph of the energy usage on "both sides" of a shutdown and restart:

What you see in the graph is pretty typical, starting at the left of the graph, you see some idle time, followed by some activity caused by the shutdown processing, then some off time. Then you see the startup processing and finally some idle time.

Note that, even though the machine did not return to the idle power consumption for 7 minutes, the computer was usable long before that.I ran this test on a computer that's an energy hog. The hog takes about 30 seconds to shutdown and has peak wattage of 183 watts. It also takes 7 minutes (60*7 = 420 seconds) from startup to idle with peak wattage of 230 watts. The idle wattage is 115 watts. Let's just estimate by taking the shutdown cost as (0.125 hours)*(230 - 115) watts = 14.375 watt hours. The off wattage is 0.7. Therefore, the breakeven point comes when the amount of saved energy is equal to the shutdown energy. In numbers, when 14.375 = 114.3 * h, where h is the time the machine is shutdown in hours. For the energy hog, this works out to be about 7.5 minutes.

Therefore, for this machine, anytime you are going to be away from the machine for more than 7.5 minutes, you can save energy by shutting the machine down.

Some of the most efficient machines available use much less energy but it's safe to assume that, if you're going to be away from your computer for more than 15 minutes, you're probably better off, from an energy perspective, in shutting it down.

So, if you are managing large groups of machines you might consider using software that saves energy and mitigates the productivity losses by actively managing machine power states.

3 Ways To Cut IT Energy Use

According to CIO.com, there are three incredibly simple ways to cut your organization's technology costs:

1) Turn computers off at night - By turning computers off when they are not in use, companies can reap big savings and lower their carbon footprint.

2) Buy energy efficient equipment - While many IT shops do recycle old equipment, it's just as important to take energy efficiency into account when buying new equipment. According to a CIO survey, currently only 32% of organizations do this.

3) Stop wasting paper - A survey by the Butler Group found that environmentally friendly printing practices can significantly reduce the amount of paper each employee wastes, sometimes by up to 400%! Educating end users about paper waste is one of the first steps a company can take.

Click here to read more.

Staples Copy and Print Centers Using Recycled Paper

All 1400 Staples Copy and Print Centers will now be using recycled paper as the standard offering for print jobs, Environmental Leader reports. This is a first for a national copy and print organization and makes Staples the office supplier that offers the most Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper overall.

“These FSC-certified recycled content paper products are another way that Staples makes it easy for customers to make a difference for the environment-what we call EcoEasy,” said Mark Buckley, vice president of environmental affairs at Staples.

Staples has set a goal of moving the majority of paper products it offers to FSC-certified paper by the end of 2010, based upon availability of supply and market conditions.

Click here to read more.