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Green Government

US university applies power saving software

By Johanna Morden | 2 June 2011

A top public university in the US is expecting to save US$800,000 annually in power bills through PC power management software.

This month, the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has implemented BigFix, a software that allows PSU’s IT staff to remotely configure the power settings of computers and enable computers to go on power-save mode when idle.

The software also empowers staff to control how and when computers wake up from the power-saving state, with such options as Wake-on-LAN and scheduled wake-ups.

20,000 of PSU’s computers have been installed with BigFix.

Brian Katyl, the PSU systems design specialist, said the university could save $25 per computer per year, amounting to $800,000 or half of its yearly power bill, while cutting an equivalent of 60,000 tons of carbon emissions.

PSU will continuously boost its drive to lower power costs through increasingly aggressive power management settings. In the future, it aims to save $50 per machine annually.

Deregulation has prompted the University to seek innovative ways of decreasing consumption costs to remove US$2 million from its power budget.

The initiative began in 2009, when PSU’s Information Technology Services (ITS), Office of Physical Plant (OPP), and Applied Research Lab (ARL) tested BigFix’s usefulness in sustaining power while maintaining or enhancing the manageability of computers.

After several weeks of testing in 5,800 university computers, the University noted a large power consumption difference between computers installed with BigFix and those that were not.

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