AT&T could be the poster child of effective power management. As we reported last October, the company
expects to save $13 million per year in electricity costs simply by installing power management software across all 310,000 of its computers.
AT&T is certainly not alone, of course; companies large and small, and in tech-intensive and tech-light industries alike have put power management in place to make it easier to shut down computers at the end of the workday but still make it simple for your IT department to update software as needed.
Next week, on Monday, March 30, the EPA's Energy Star program and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative are teaming up to present a free
IT Power Management Summit to help spread the word and make it easy for companies to get involved if they haven't yet gotten these projects underway.
There is a major need for this program, according to Steve Ryan from the EPA's Energy Star program, because most companies are still in the dark about power management. Power management projects can be cheap or free -- there are many tools available for free, whether the
EPA's EZ GPO tool,
Verdiem's Edison, or others; and even the most expensive tools only cost around $15 per PC, while the savings can run up to $65 per PC per year.
The Summit will lay out the basics of power management, offer case studies from Verizon (which has saved in the range of $65 per PC and projects potential savings of $7 million per year when applied to all the company's PCs) and other organizations, and will look into research around how much energy can potentially be saved by PC Power Management.
The Summit is free to attend, and runs from 12-2pm ET / 9-11am PT. Although it's geared more toward IT professionals, Steve Ryan told me yesterday that anyone will benefit from the Summit, and all attendees will receive a free copy of a new report on PC Power Management from Forrester Research entitled, "How Much Money Are Your Idle PCs Wasting?"
For more details and to register for the IT Power Management Summit, visit
http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org/it-power-management-summit.
Denali photo CC-licensed by Flickr user Unhindered by Talent.
