• Save Your School Money

    by
    russdev
    Published on 24th June 2010 08:20 AM
    5 Comments Comments
    At this year’s Sims.net Annual conference Capita in partnership with Verismic showed a new solution that has the potential to save a secondary school with their power bills. The way the software can save you money is by using the tools on the Verismic Power Management software to manage the power on your computer.

    The software that provides an all in one solution goes far beyond just setting and enforcing power policies it provides a number of useful reports on what each policy is doing and what money you are projected to save.

    The most useful feature of the software however is to be able to see a breakdown of when a machine was off, when it is being used and more importantly when a machine is on but not being used by anyone.

    Another useful feature is the machine shutdown and startup component of the software. While there are a number of solutions that do this already one of the ‘killer’ features is the smart shutdown. This means that if a process is running or is using more than a specified percentage of memory or cpu it will halt the shutdown until that PC is ready.

    The current government has already said it wants ‘to be the greenest government ever’ which means local authorities will have even more targets and consequently there will be even more pressure for schools to look at how to make sure that IT is managed in a greener way. Verismic is just one way schools can start to look at the green IT agenda.
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    Comments 5 Comments
    1. matt40k's Avatar
      matt40k - 1st July 2010, 08:11 AM
      shutdown -m \\computername -s

      There you go, I've just saved you $60 per machine.

      Now if there was only some sort of program that would allow be do calculations to work out how much money\electricity I've saved and created graphs based on my data.
    1. manly's Avatar
      manly - 22nd October 2010, 09:55 AM
      @matt40k is these time of recession I agree with on this one even it tongue and cheek or not money has to stop being wasted . lol lol
    1. camel's Avatar
      camel - 22nd October 2010, 10:26 AM
      Cheers russ for all your presentations about green computing and money saving in ICT over recent months. Been very insightful and though provoking.

      Spiceworks has the intel power manager plugin. It shows you a snapshot of what PCs are on when they should be off and visa versa, includes a cost saving as you can define the cost per kilowatt, but has no data-logging. Also the FOG Project has built-in power management solution (server/client based) that can shutdown/reboot any computer not logged in. And as an added bonus, you can set the auto logoff feature to auto log off machines after X mins of inactivity. It also has an scheduled wakeup feature. All free.
    1. nephilim's Avatar
      nephilim - 22nd October 2010, 10:27 AM
      I was given a directive from the bosses above, when people finish in an ICT suite, they are to shut down the machines, and only use the ones they need. That way we do not waste electricity. When I told them about the PSU going bang as this is exceedingly bad practice, they put it in writing for me, but that said, we have saved over £400 in electricity in 1 term due to this being in place....
    1. john's Avatar
      john - 22nd October 2010, 06:38 PM
      I have found Windows 7 and Virtualisation have helped save us 3000 KWh of electricity in one month which is great news for us, shame the tarrif on the electric went up thus comparing the cost to 12 months ago its cost us an extra couple of hundred pounds, BUT the saving is there as the bill would have been around £300 more than it actually was with the previous usage.