CER Chair Chloe Munro said, “We’ve written to around 330 entities advising we believe they are likely to be liable entities for the 2012-13 financial year. These entities account for over 95 per cent of emissions covered by the carbon pricing mechanism.”

“Following that consultation we have today published 248 entities that we are satisfied are likely to be liable entities. These entities account for around 70 per cent of emissions covered by the carbon pricing mechanism.”

sustainableIT has analysed the list of 248 liable entities in the initial LEPID and has segmented them, by industry, as follows:

As expected, the main targets of the carbon tax are the heavy CO₂ emitters in the mining and exploration, electricity and gas, heavy manufacturing and utilities segments.  Interestingly, the list also includes food processors, pastoral companies_, regional and city councils and a university.

The full listing is available on the CER’s website at http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/Carbon-Pricing-Mechanism/Public-information-databases/Pages/default.aspx.

Commenting on the listing of liable entities as advised by the CER, sustainableIT Director Jon James said “the entities included in the CER’s liable entities public information database reflect the major emitters of CO₂ in Australia in 2012-13.  The majority of the entities are closely involved with the primary production of minerals and energy or are big energy consumers such as large manufacturers or utility companies.  Most are already committed to acting responsibly and sustainably and they will be further incented to adopt cleaner technologies in the future.”

The carbon tax is designed to create incentives for companies, businesses and individuals to change their behaviors and consumption patterns to reduce the reliance on polluting fossil fuels.  This is simply illustrated in the Carbon Tax Cycle diagram set out below.

In the absence of an ability to reduce or offset their CO₂ emissions, the entities in the LEPID will pass on the cost of the carbon tax to their customers, who will in turn add these increased input costs to their own selling prices, ultimately trickling down to end users.

In turn, end users will inevitably modify their consumption habits by demanding products that are more sustainable and environmentally friendly, which in turn will generate innovation and efficiency across a broad range of industries and will ultimately drive the economy towards the use of cleaner and/or more efficient technologies.

“One of the key drivers of the carbon tax is to encourage consumers and businesses to embrace new processes and technologies in order to be more energy efficient.  IT departments can play a pivotal role in assisting their companies achieve energy savings through the adoption of Green IT strategies.  These strategies can include the virtualisation of servers, efficient management of data centre cooling systems, adoption of technologies such as video conferencing to reduce unnecessary travel, recycling of old technology equipment, efficient printer set-up and usage and the adoption of advanced PC power management software to manage energy usage on PC estates” said James.

sustainableIT recommends the use of 1E’s range of energy and IT efficiency products to assist IT departments play their part in reducing energy usage and waste in their organisation.  1E (www.1e.com) is a global leader in IT efficiency products and together we offer a range of solutions to enterprise level customers that are focused on:

• PC and server power management (NightWatchman Enterprise and NightWatchman Server Edition);
• Streamlined systems management (Nomad Enterprise);
• Finding and recycling unused software in the PC estate (AppClarity); and
• The provisioning of software to users in the enterprise via an “app store” type utility (Shopping).

1E has sold over 16 million individual user licenses worldwide over the past 14 years.  Each of 1E’s products is designed to create efficient IT solutions and to provide a quick ROI to reduce energy usage, increase productivity or cut costs – all essential deliverables for organisations and IT management looking to maximise the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit).  1E’s products all have a demonstrable and rapid ROI and are designed for quick and easy deployment.

More information on all of sustainableIT’s solutions, including product datasheets, videos and customer case studies is available at www.sustainableit.com.au.

More information on the LEPID for 2012-13 Financial Year can be downloaded from the CER web site at http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/About-us/Pages/default.aspx.

Date: 9 May 2012

Source: sustainableIT

“Rising electricity prices are having a major impact on the cost of living and of doing business.  All Australians know this and are naturally concerned about it.  However, it has been a widely held and expressed view that Australian electricity prices has been amongst the lowest in the developed world and that, even with the recent increases, Australia was still in ‘the middle of the pack’,”  Mr. Roman Domanski, Executive Director of the EUAA said.

“This research by consultants, Carbon & Energy Markets (CME), exposes the myth that Australia continues to have low, or even mid range, electricity prices.  Electricity is becoming a lot less affordable for both households and businesses and our prices are now a source of national weakness rather than strength” said Mr Domanski.

Commenting on this new research paper from the EUAA, sustainableIT Director Jon James said “the findings in the EUAA report come as no surprise.  The gap between local energy prices and our international peers is likely to increase even further when the recently legislated Clean Energy Act, 2011 imposes the carbon tax of $23/tonne of CO₂ emissions on the top 500 emitters from July of this year.”

“One of the key drivers of the carbon tax is to encourage consumers and businesses to embrace new processes and technologies in order to be more energy efficient.  IT departments can play a pivotal role in assisting their companies achieve energy savings through the adoption of Green IT strategies.  These strategies can include the virtualisation of servers, efficient management of data centre cooling systems, adoption of technologies such as video conferencing to reduce unnecessary travel, recycling of old technology equipment, efficient printer set-up and usage and the adoption of advanced PC power management software to manage energy usage on PC estates” said James.

sustainableIT recommends the use of 1E’s range of energy and IT efficiency products to assist IT departments play their part in reducing energy usage and waste in their organisation.  1E (www.1e.com) is a global leader in IT efficiency products and together we offer a range of solutions to enterprise level customers that are focused on:

• PC and server power management (NightWatchman Enterprise and NightWatchman Server Edition);
• Streamlined systems management (Nomad Enterprise);
• Finding and recycling unused software in the PC estate (AppClarity); and
• The provisioning of software to users in the enterprise via an “app store” type utility (Shopping).

1E has sold over 16 million individual user licences worldwide over the past 14 years.  Each of 1E’s products is designed to create efficient IT solutions and to provide a quick ROI to reduce energy usage, increase productivity or cut costs – all essential deliverables for organisations and IT management looking to maximise the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit).  1E’s products all have a demonstrable and rapid ROI and are designed for quick and easy deployment.

More information on all of sustainableIT’s solutions, including product datasheets, videos and customer case studies is available at www.sustainableit.com.au.

The EUAA paper can be downloaded from the EUAA web site at www.euaa.com.au.

Date: 22 March 2012

Source: sustainableIT

1E, the global leader in IT efficiency software, today announced that it has extended its strategic partnership with sustainableIT, a recognised leader in the field of green ICT and sustainable computing. An existing partner in South Africa since 2008, sustainableIT enhances its consultancy and implementation capabilities in Australia and New Zealand by offering the full suite of Efficient IT solutions from 1E to organizations in the region.

“We are excited to bring sustainableIT on board in Australia and New Zealand at a critical time in the region’s history. Pilloried for being the world’s worst polluter per capita and facing a carbon tax, Australia in particular has a big challenge ahead. We can help Australian organizations reduce their energy use by focusing specifically on corporate PCs and servers, which account for 60% of IT energy use. Our solutions clearly demonstrate where energy waste is occurring and help customers take steps to make savings – in terms of cost, CO2 emissions and electricity consumption,” comments Sumir Karayi, CEO, 1E.

“When we looked to develop our sales channel in the region, sustainableIT was an obvious choice, largely because of the traction it had with deploying our Efficient IT solutions in the South African market over the past four years,” comments Sumir Karayi, CEO, 1E.

“The impending Clean Energy Act is making Australian organizations look at their energy costs. Faced with having to pay one of the highest prices per tonne of carbon in the world – almost double that of anywhere in Europe – organizations know they need to take steps to reduce their energy use,” comments Jon James, Director, sustainableIT.

“Coupling sustainableIT’s consulting capabilities with 1E’s proven power management leadership and Microsoft Gold Partner status is strategically important for both organisations as we look to help ICT departments locally make a difference to their organizational carbon footprints.”

As part of the agreement, sustainableIT now offers 1E’s five IT Efficiency solutions: NightWatchman® Enterprise, the PC power management market leader ; NightWatchman® Server Edition, which maximises server efficiency ; Nomad Enterprise™, the WAN optimization technology ; Shopping™, the app store for the enterprise and AppClarity™, which identifies, quantifies, reclaims and recycles unused software.

Emilie Ditton, Research Manager, IDC Australia, says: “Green IT products and services can deliver benefits such as cost, time, power and energy savings as well as lower waste production, while also utilizing fewer resources. According to our latest Forecast for Management survey from May 2011, 36.8% of the 239 Australian respondents we polled have already deployed Green IT initiatives, while a further 28.5% plan to deploy green IT initiatives in the next 12 to 24 months. It is clear that good progress is being made.”

1E has a number of existing customers in Australia and New Zealand, including the City of Melbourne,Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority and Kiwibank. In South Africa, 1E and sustainableIT share a number of significant customers including direct insurance leader OUTsurance and one of South Africa’s leading financial services groups SANLAM.

Source: Reuters 28 February 2012

How does it work?

TheCarbonReport.com is a cloud based offering which guides an organisation through an intuitive data collection process and builds an emissions inventory based on the globally accepted Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Reporting and Accounting Standard.

The offering, which is priced as an annual subscription based on the complexity and size of the organisation, provides not only the ability to capture a carbon inventory but also to report on it through a fully featured reporting tool.

A ‘walk through tour’ is offered, at no charge, which gives users the ability to evaluate the solution before signing up to the service.

The solution also offers validation of metrics as well as certification of audits if required.

This is not just another calculator

Teresa Legg, director at sustainableIT describes the solution as ’not just another calculator’. “What we have done with The Carbon Report is build an intuitive toolset that allows organisations of any size or complexity to build an auditable carbon inventory and report on it. There are few, if any, tools out there that do this as simply or as cost effectively as we have managed.”

Reporting is done with strict adherence to the GHG protocol and has been developed in such a way that ownership of the process can be retained internally.

The calculation and reporting complexity of traditional footprinting has been absorbed within the tool so as not to confuse the end user but still deliver a quality report as output.

Broaden the base

The offering is aimed at organisations of any size or complexity. “Every business has to start focusing on the triple bottom line of people, profit and planet”, explains Legg. “Understanding your carbon footprint provides a measure of your impact and allows you to develop concrete plans to reduce emissions and ultimately eliminate unwanted costs in your business”, she concludes.

The process of carbon footprinting is set to get a lot easier and businesses will be better able to start focusing on emissions reduction opportunities to ensure they remain globally competitive in a rapidly evolving low carbon economy.

This solution is scheduled for release in Australia in the first quarter of 2012.

The IT industry uses a lot of power. It’s arguable that its entire history is determined at a fundamental level by the properties of electricity. Processors have gone multi-core because single cores have cooling problems at higher speeds, some peripherals such as display adapters have their own cooling units for the same reason, there’s a massive global shift to virtualised infrastructure for power and efficiency reasons, and datacentres have been redesigned to be as efficient as possible.

One of the biggest wakeup calls was published in 2007: a study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that estimated that the US spent nearly $3 billion in 2005 keeping its datacentres on and cooled and that the world in total spent $7 billion. But since then, datacentres, by far the hungriest consumers of power, have gone virtual.

David McMurdo, sales and business unit manager for enterprise server and storage at HP SA, says that unit counts – the number of boxes shipped – from Q1 2007 through to Q4 2010 haven’t changed.

“There’s been no change up or down. We can say that the virtualisation trend has kept the unit count constant.”

Tim James, director at Sustainable IT, says that although the unit count has stayed the same, utilisation has increased.

“You are using more of each server. A normal server sits at 15 percent utilisation; a virtual one is up around 75 percent.”

Chris Norton, regional director for southern Africa at VMWare, says the saving isn’t as big as everyone thinks.

“The metric is that an idle machine still uses 70 percent of the power requirements as a fully-utilised machine,” he says. “A study in 2009 shows that there are more virtual machines than physical ones, so one would expect the size of the physical footprint to come down over time. But the trend we’ve seen is that people are looking to save power so they can fit more servers in the datacentres, not to be good corporate citizens. Companies run out of physical power on the grid and they have two options then: build another datacentre in another location, or use their existing resources more efficiently.”

Barry Hatfield, business development manager for cloud services at Internet Solutions, agrees that it’s all about efficiency in the local market but there’s also another key reason.

“I think specifically in the Johannesburg area, there’s only so much power available in certain areas. In our datacentre, we’ve put in cooling technologies and are becoming more efficient. That is a green initiative but the driver is so we can put more racks down.”

Dan Engel, regional sales manager for Polycom, says the reasons for going green vary from country to country and should be driven by governments.

“Once a government gives tax relief benefits because a company is able to show that it’s green, it becomes not just a CIO issue but a CEO and CFO issue. When the government is pushing it, then adoption is much faster.”

Sean Wainer, country manager for Citrix SA, says it won’t be driven by government in South Africa but purely by capacity.

“The fact of the matter is that our utility does not have the ability to provide the power required. So our adoption is not going to be driven by rebates but by demand. We need to build datacentres and we need to power them. Our utility isn’t going to come up with clever ways of supplying more power.”

HP’s McMurdo points out that green IT isn’t coming through in procurement either.

“It’s not a requirement on a tender. The typical ones are there: processing power, memory, storage and so on, but there are never questions about power requirements, recycling and re-use. We’ve just shipped an order to government and it was all about price and capacity. It’s tough for hardware vendors who invest a lot of R&D in lowering power consumption and government takes no notice. The hosting providers are charging by kilowatt but outside that, not much.”

Dell SA’s Kobus de Beer, product marketing for enterprise products, says the efficiency drive by vendors has been prompted by the IT industry’s carbon footprint.

“We did a study that showed that the IT industry generates more carbon than the airline industry. That’s why there’s so much research from the hardware vendors, so see if you can consolidate 180 servers into 22.”

Sustainable IT’s James says he’s seen companies starting to be quizzed on their environmental track records.

“Some of the big corporates are starting to drive that. That means smaller suppliers have to report that because the bigger companies have voluntary requirements to be greener. But we’re miles away from it being driven from government.”

VMWare’s Norton says that modern hardware and software has efficiency and green elements built in already because they source technology from global vendors.

“So to go greener in this country, it’s really just a light bulb that has to be turned on somewhere. I think government should be involved in the same way that BEE is a government initiative. In the manufacturing and IT sector, there should be a similar one. For every server you take out, you’re removing one and half tons of emissions per year. Until government make it a requirement, other companies won’t make it a requirement to do business with them.”

Cultural considerations

HP’s McMurdo says that the culture in the office is important. Laptops with docking stations still draw power if plugged in overnight.

“Our offices here aren’t that intelligent. There are no IT systems working the buildings, shutting off things when they aren’t needed. We can’t just focus on the datacenter, we have to get the culture everywhere.”

The technology does exist – Polycom’s Engel calls it basic functionality.

“In our offices in Israel, a relatively warm country, we have motion sensors connected to the lights and the air conditioning. This is something you can implement and save immediately on the electricity bill.”

Citrix’s Wainer asks whether that sort of culture is driven bottom-up or top-down.

“Is it a company’s responsibility to enforce green or is it a personal thing to unplug your power supply?”

James says he’s seen more than 90 percent of corporate desktops stay on 24/7 and a quarter of laptops stay in the office over the weekend.

“To be honest, there is technology to power stuff up and down when it’s needed. We just don’t get it in this country. We’re in the Dark Ages from that point of view.”

Ereeza Ryland, chief marketing officer at Powertime, says it should be a top-down thing.

“You have to build it into your mission statement. But IT can be used as the enabler for this: software and hardware sensors can be used to measure everything right up to buildings and infrastructures.”

Gus Pinto, brand manager for Fujitsu at Di-Nostix, has some examples.

“One of the things we have is zero power devices. When the device goes into standby mode, the power goes down. That also works for AC adapters, notebooks and docking stations. The minute you walk out of the office, click – it’s off. But this has to be adopted from the top down otherwise most people won’t bother.”

IS’ Hatfield says the easiest driver is cost.

“We don’t build datacentres based on how many racks we can fit in, we build them based on how much power we can get into a site. Clients who use more power in their racks get charged for that. Those clients are very aware of what their kit is drawing. Those are the people who start looking for more efficient solutions.”

Dell’s de Beer agrees that culture change can be nudged in the right direction by cost.

“When there are budget issues or interest rate hikes, we start pushing. We turn off our geysers. At companies, when things get tight, IT guys ask how much power they can save. But from a culture point of view, we’re just not there yet. I’m just as guilty. I don’t recycle and I’ve investigated putting in a solar geyser at my home for the last seven years and wondered about the ROI.”

June Julyan, sales director at Bateleur, says cultural attitudes are heavily influenced by knowledge – or lack of it.

“I don’t know, for example, whether leaving my cellphone charger plugged in draws power or not. You start discussing that at the office and someone will say it’s a fallacy. Someone pooh-poohs it then it gets pushed away.”

Coming changes

But despite the ad-hoc nature of most South Africans’ attitudes towards greener policies, there is at least one document pushing for more sustainability: the King III report. Sustainable IT’s Tim James says corporates are starting to take more notice.

“King III mentions corporate sustainability and it’s definitely starting to get onto the agenda of CIOs and CEOs. They’ve heard about it and they don’t know what to do about it, just that they have to tick the box. And it really is just box-ticking at this stage. But the reality is there are big cost savings. The technology has it built
in already.”

Powertime’s Ryland notes that power costs are going up by 25 percent per year for the next three years.

“If a company goes over a certain usage, they will be penalised. Perhaps we should be looking at which department uses more power.”

Norton says it comes down to gluttony.

“There’s over $140 billion worth of excess server capacity out there in the industry. That equates to a three-year supply to the industry. We’re running way more technology than we really need. Most organisations provision for the peak. Instead, they should be provisioning for the average and outsourcing the peak to the cloud.”

Source: Paul Furber, Brainstorm Magazine, April 2011

The maturity assessment enables comparisons around Green IT activities across industry sectors and against peers, giving ICT departments a perspective on how they are tracking and where they should be focusing their efforts. It seeks to quantify current best practice and to better understand the role that ICT has in enabling sustainable business activities.

The solution, provides an introductory report that gives a number of valuable insights into the comparative performances of ICT organisations. It takes respondents through a series of questions which rank companies based on Green Intent, Current Implementation, Adoption, Funding and Action.  It also provides insight as to where a company ranks against nine key Green IT initiatives.

“Whilst Green IT has been highly topical in the last two years, real progress and action has been very slow” says Tim James, director at sustainableIT. “Many companies are battling to come to grips with where their energy should be focused.  The Fast Benchmark service allows organisations to get a perspective of where they are, how they compare against their peers and provides clear direction around developing a Green IT strategy”, James elaborates.

Many opportunities from an ICT perspective exist in terms of reducing cost, co2 emissions and energy.  These range from PC power management and printing in the distributed environment to virtualisation, cloud computing and datacentre optimisation at the back end.  The question is where does one start, and what needs to be done?

“Partnering with sustainableIT offers British Worldwide Computing a niche set of skills that understands not only the Australian market, but also how sustainability and computing is intrinsically interlinked”, commented Martin Jackson, Managing Director of BWC. “We expect this strategic partnership to go from strength to strength”.

With the future advent of  integrated reporting requirements for listed companies and the increasing focus on energy and costs, ICT departments can no longer ignore sustainability.  This is rapidly moving up the priority list on the CIO’s agenda.  Fast Benchmark provides a valuable tool to get an organisation started.

To access the benchmark tool click here

NightWatchman extends the core PC power management capabilities offered by Microsoft’s SCCM R3, providing additional functionality to manage complex scenario’s across a typical enterprise network. 1E offers deep support for Windows 7, older operating systems and Macs; helps fix “sleepless” PCs; and includes outstanding wake-on-lan capabilities for patching purposes. Users can remotely wake up their work PCs for remote access as well as opt-out of power management during important tasks. NightWatchman also comes with a comprehensive PC make and model power database, senior-management dashboard and baseline energy management capabilities to help gain proven savings over time.

Together, SCCM R3 and 1E NightWatchman give organizations a powerful way to manage today’s power-intensive IT systems. They deliver three key tools that organizations need:

• Administrative flexibility, so that organizations can better manage a diverse IT environment.
• User empowerment, so that organizations can tailor power management policies without an adverse effect on employee productivity.
• Advanced reporting, to create a clear and highly accurate picture of cost savings and energy-use reductions.

With SCCM R3 and 1E NightWatchman, organizations can develop power-management strategies that make sense.

Administrative Flexibility

Most organizations have an IT environment that consists of multiple operating systems and have varying needs for patching and powering PCs on or off. SCCM R3 and 1E NightWatchman offer organizations the flexibility needed to handle a complex IT infrastructure and make SCCM R3 power management enterprise ready.

For instance, one barrier to effective power management has been the concern that data may be lost during forced shut-downs. To avoid this, power management with SCCM R3 takes a conservative approach to enabling power savings with hibernate or sleep modes. Power policies can be created that save similar amounts of power, but do not completely shut systems off. Instead, they lower power consumption on components during idle periods and put systems into sleep modes. SCCM R3 provides the necessary engine to set and configure Windows power policies centrally on clients, ensuring that PCs go into a sleep mode after a period of inactivity.

However, some applications do not transition to sleep or hibernate very effectively. NightWatchman extends that capability to manage an organization’s specific needs and provides additional power down functionality. Most enterprises require a range of power-management exceptions so that important processes are not disrupted. NightWatchman allows IT managers to set power-down rules so that PCs performing key tasks are exempted from scheduled sleep or hibernate periods. At the same time, rules can be set so that PCs not currently performing key tasks can be powered down.

To wake PC’s for patching purposes, SCCM R3 provides wake from sleep timers using the operating system to wake machines at a pre-defined time.  NightWatchman enhances this capability by providing wake-on-lan, either scheduled or on demand with no network modifications required.  Machines woken with 1E WakeUP can be configured to go back to a lower power state as soon as maintenance is completed.

NightWatchman enhances the standard Windows power settings by repairing “sleepless” PCs, where rogue applications and drivers prevent PCs from sleeping when they should. Together with SCCM R3, 1E NightWatchman can identify and repair sleepless PCs and squeeze savings out of an organization’s power-management scheme – including servers when used with NightWatchman Server Edition.

Empowering Users to Effectively Manage Power Needs

Another barrier to power management adoption has been a worry that remote users will not be able to access their office PCs and concerns that forced “sleep” sessions could interrupt important tasks. SCCM R3 and 1E NightWatchman give IT managers and client users the control they need to ensure that power management does not interfere with critical business tasks.

Most organizations have at least some systems that fall into the ‘exception’ category. In certain cases, there are systems that are required to be powered on and fully available at all hours. Other systems may not have necessary compliant hardware for power management.  SCCM R3 allows different departments or business units to have different policies, depending on their needs. In addition, two power management policies can be set for all clients: one for peak periods and one for non-peak periods. This allows for more aggressive power management policies to be enacted at night during non-peak periods, with more lax settings in place during the day.

NightWatchman adds to these capabilities so that employees can take further control of their power consumption. PC users performing critical tasks can choose to temporarily “opt out” of power management. In addition, 1E’s Web Wake Up – a part of NightWatchman – allows workers who are traveling or telecommuting to navigate to a secure Web page and turn on their office PCs when remote access is required. NightWatchman also checks PCs for applications that are in use and is designed to securely save data before rebooting for a patch application or other process.

Advanced Reporting Completes the Picture

One key aspect of a power-management solution is to offer concrete evidence of the actual and potential energy savings. By placing an ‘agent’ on every PC, NightWatchman measures activity and uses ‘what-if’ analyses to predict the eventual power savings that could be achieved by putting PCs into a low power state when they are not being used. This information gains reliability by drawing upon make and model-specific power consumption values and location-specific energy costs and carbon tariffs.

Moreover, once policies are in place, SCCM R3 and NightWatchman continue to track power consumption and settings on all managed clients. This information can be stored for years in the data warehouse, giving a long-term look at power efficiency and CO2 emission reductions. The SCCM R3 environmental impact report can be run across all systems or a collection of systems using a specific CO2 rating as an input parameter.

NightWatchman also provides an executive dashboard that shows high-level management information at a glance. It is customizable and can be tailored to suit an individual organization and managers’ needs.

See a comparative matrix of the functionality of NightWatchman with competing vendors’ products.

In Australia, with the pending introduction of a carbon tax and increasing energy rates, it stands to reason that companies need to become more innovative in the way they deliver services and provide quantifiable savings to the bottom line.

1E, a global software and services company, has recently released version 6 of its PC power management solution, NightWatchman. Represented in Australia by sustainableIT, the solution helps corporations manage their network of computers to optimise energy efficiency and deliver measurable savings. It gives IT managers the ability to remotely power down and power up computers and implement energy-saving policies and settings. An example would be to shutdown desktops at 6pm on weekdays and wake them up for one hour at midnight for patch management purposes.

According to Gartner Research, energy efficiency as it relates to IT management is becoming an increasingly important field. They predict that in two years time, more than half of mid and large-sized businesses will centrally manage their desktops’ energy consumption.

On average, NightWatchman can save around $70 per PC per year in energy costs (compared with leaving the PC powered on), with those incremental savings yielding significant sums in aggregate. Several of 1E’s clients are large corporations with massive IT operations, such as HSBC, AT&T, Ford and Dell.

HSBC, one of the largest users of NightWatchman globally, reportedly saved in excess of US$ 1 million in 2009 by centrally powering down more than 250,000 workstations using NightWatchman. According to 1E, NightWatchman has 4.6 million licensed users around the world, a group that has collectively saved $530 million in energy costs and in excess of 4.3 million tonnes of CO₂.

Key to saving energy is to provide management information across the organisation. You cannot manage what you don’t measure.  NightWatchman delivers full management reporting on cost, energy and CO₂ emissions savings. Reporting can be segmented by business unit or location. A web-based dashboard helps managers oversee the entire company’s computer power usage and associated carbon emissions.

“NightWatchman is a must for any company looking to achieve additional energy savings”, states Jon James, Director of sustainableIT.  “ICT, and particularly PC’s and monitors, consume a significant amount of energy, especially when left on 24×7 for no business reason”, James elaborates.  “Implementing a centralised power management tool with automated PC wake up, like NightWatchman, is a quick win and corporations can achieve immediate savings”, he concludes.

NightWatchman, and its sister product NightWatchman Server Edition, are significant components of sustainableIT’s roadmap for companies looking to green their IT services and significantly reduce both costs and co2 emissions.

With offices in Australia and South Africa and with the technical backing of 1E (www.1e.com), our services engagement model is designed to be delivered where our customers are located, leveraging efficient low carbon technology such as web and teleconferencing where appropriate.  This provides our customers with access to a highly skilled consultancy arm, geared to deliver a sustainable computing strategy anywhere on the planet.

sustainableIT represents 1E in Australia and Africa and has access to their global support program, technical staff and business development teams to support our customers with the entire 1E product set.  Being part of 1E’s global sales engine, we can assist you with your requirements wherever you are located.

IT Footprinter^TM , a unique offering from sustainableIT delivers a carbon footprint of the IT service based on the globally recognised Greenhouse Gas Protocol accounting standard, thus allowing you to integrate the output with your broader CSR reporting initiatives.

IT Analyser^TM is an in-depth assessment of the IT service from procurement through to disposal of assets, based on Industry best practice and intellectual capital developed by sustainableIT.  IT Transformer^TM takes the engagement full circle to assist you in developing a sustainable computing strategy.

Contact us to learn more.

For many companies that are supposedly “going green”, changing the light bulbs is where it starts and ends and this lack of continuous commitment leads to significant energy waste and unnecessary costs.

Whilst powering off PC’s overnight remains the number one priority for ICT departments when it comes to Green IT, the challenge is to make sure that the solution is enterprise ready and meets the needs of the business concerned.

Jon James, Director of local consultancy sustainableIT, highlights that the failures of power management strategies are a direct result of the lack of understanding around the complexities and requirements of an enterprise power management solution.  “Most tools, including Active Directory, rely on operating system inactivity to place workstations into a lower power state.  The reality is that power management is not a one size fits all solution and a successful power management strategy relies on a combination of standby, shutdown and hibernate policies”, James states.

“We see many customers that have tried standby and hibernate strategies, using either group policy or other toolsets.  The result is that certain applications do not transition effectively into standby which often leads to issues elsewhere in the infrastructure such as application failures and database corruptions.  When IT departments realise these issues, the standby policies are often immediately removed and are never revisited”, James elaborates.

Building blocks to success

A successful solution is one that requires little administrative overhead and enhances the delivery of the IT service, whilst delivering measurable savings at the same time.  James points to 5 key ingredients for a successful enterprise solution; namely accurate reporting, flexibility in shutdown approach, no end user impact, the ability to resolve PC Insomnia as well as secure wake-on-lan.

PC Insomnia

A fundamental problem with standby based solutions is that as much as 25% of the PC estate may not transition to a lower power state due to a phenomenon known as PC insomnia.  What happens under the covers is that certain processes keep the operating system ‘awake’ despite the fact that the machine is idle, resulting in no sleep or hibernate and wasted energy; classic insomnia.  Any PC power management solution must have the ability to address and resolve this issue or an organisation is just leaving money on the table.

Wake-on-lan

James believes the failures of wake-on-lan in a secure network is often mistakenly the main reason why power management is not adopted.  Without the ability to wake machines for out of hours maintenance, IT departments will simply not power off.  “An enterprise power management solution should provide wake-on-lan out of the box with no network changes required.  If it doesn’t, it isn’t worth the investment” James concludes.

As the pain of energy cost increases become more apparent, coupled with a growing requirement to reduce CO2 emissions under the proposed Carbon Tax legislation, it remains to be seen whether IT departments start to manage their device up time in the most efficient manner.