(imported topic written by BenKus)
Hi everybody,
We have been getting lots of inbound questions regarding our new popular BigFix Power Management site. Since most of the people on this forum are BigFix Administrators and BigFix Operators, you may be asked about this new solution. The marketing and sales information we have available is useful, but I thought I would take a stab at a basic technical explanation of BigFix Power Management that didn’t involve too much marketing “fluff” that sometimes is distracting for people who actually care about how it works.
BigFix Power Management is a Fixlet site (which is very easy to activate for everyone with 6.0+) and does several things:
- Measures power consumption for each computer and in aggregate
- Allows you to do sophisticated management of power settings
- Has wake-on-lan capabilities (including “distributed” wake-on-lan)
By centralizing all management of power-related activities, you immediately get some cool benefits:
- Ability to see how much money you are spending on powering computers (by analyzing attributes of the computer, uptime, power settings, along with info about cost of power).
- Ability to see areas to save power and money (for instance, enabling monitor standby after 20 minutes can save quite a bit of money).
- Ability to see how many computers are powered-off or powered-on for nights and weekends.
- Ability to enforce sophisticated power settings policies (for instance, users monitors go into standby, but if the user changes the monitor mode for a presentation, they can keep the setting, but it will get reset each Friday at midnight… or computers will go into standby if there is no user activity starting at 8pm except for Wednesdays when they are scheduled for patch and software updates).
- And so on…
The benefits of power management can be immediate and significant:
- By allowing so much control and information, it gives companies the ability to set power management options that work with IT as opposed to hindering them.
- There is tremendous cost savings potential. Depending on the current power usage, you can potentially save anywhere from $5-$100 per computer per year with some simple changes.
- There are a number of power rebates available from power companies and some tax rebates if you implement centralized power savings software like BigFix Power Management.
- The reduction of power directly correlates with reduction of greenhouse gases which allows your companies to potentially qualify for “green” awards and certifications (BigFix Power Management reports on greenhouse gases reduction in addition to power/cost reduction).
If you are interested in trying BigFix Power Management at your company, it is very easy:
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Contact licensing@bigfix.com and request BigFix Power Management.
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Follow the simple instructions to activate power tracking on some or all your computers.
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Wait a couple days for the system to collect information on “normal” power usage.
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At this point you will have a pretty complete picture of your power consumption status and potential savings.
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You can contact your account representative to talk about how to license BigFix Power Management and get access to the rebates. Additionally, BigFix can help consult on the best way to reduce power without affecting normal IT operations or bothering users.
More information:
https://bigfix.webex.com/bigfix/nbrshared.php?action=playback&recordID=20034982&recordKey=F0EA08A2A56806CE167B00D8B544EB2BB8A91879DB734C2320F420F90F49D3B0 - recent webinar from BigFix that explains power management (also has information from a representative from Southern California Edison about how to get a $15 per computer rebate from the power company simply by using BigFix Power Management).
http://support.bigfix.com/bes/sites/powermanagement.html - Technical instructions about using power management (example screenshots included)
http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13569_22-155482.html - “Lowering Computer Power Consumption” video (4 minutes) in editorial series for ZDNet’s “At the Whiteboard”… starring me! (this is more about the general problem and less about our specific product).
http://www.bigfix.com/products/powermanagement.php - some BigFix website info.
This is one of our most popular sites and everyone at our company is very happy to see that in addition to helping companies with their IT security and operational issues, we can actually help do some good for the environment (and save money too)… We think this stuff is very cool and we hope you all can get a chance to check it out…
Please contact your account or sales representative if you want information about a trial, a full demo/presentation about the benefits, or general questions…
Ben