Power IT Down Day

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This week, on August 27, 2010, over 4,800 people have already pledged to turn off their IT devices to help save energy. You can sign up to participate at http://poweritdown.org.

The organizers point out that “Just by turning off your computer, monitor and printer — and any other peripherals — when you leave work for the day, you can help save tens of thousands of costly kilowatt hours.”

All of us here at JouleX support the efforts of Power IT Down Day. We invite all of our blog readers to join in on Friday. We also want to add some other ideas to help reduce the IT energy consumption in the enterprise:

The Top 10 Power Management Tips to help enterprises power down IT and save energy are as follows:

1. Baseline Power Consumption. Identify and pinpoint the top enterprise network power consumers and then accelerate a hardware refresh program based on the energy savings.
2. Implement Energy Automation: Automatically power down all end-user devices such as PCs, MACs, IP phones, and monitors.
3. Reduce Carbon Footprint of Printers. By using a carbon footprint calculator for printing, estimate printer energy, paper usage, consolidation opportunities and estimate carbon and cost implications. Hewlett-Packard offers a free calculator.
4. Identify Under-utilized Equipment: Identify under-utilized PCs and servers consuming the most power.  These PCs and servers represent an excellent opportunity for virtualization.
5. Boost LEED Certification. Increase LEED certification by actively monitoring energy consumption of the current IT infrastructure.
6. Decrease Power Usage in Embedded Systems.  Work to design systems, such as those with Intel’s latest embedded processors and chipsets, to automatically adjust the power state to use only the energy required by the workload.
7. Implement Location-based Policies:  Automatically power up and down all end-user devices using location-based policies such as by GPS location or via a building’s security badge management system.
8. Power Down Idle Presentation Servers During Off Business Hours. Simply powering off these servers during "off business hours" can save 30 to 50 percent of server farm power consumption. Companies can take advantage of a free Citrix PowerSmart Utility to do this.
9. Set Carbon Reduction Goals: As a company, identify a goal for reducing energy costs and carbon footprint within a certain time period.
10. Get a free demo of JouleX Energy Manager.  Take the first step in understanding toward responsible energy consumption by gaining real-time understanding of energy usage and wasted costs. 

Leveraging these ideas will help corporate IT staffs to gain control of their energy consumption and save both on carbon emissions and energy costs.

Thank you for taking the time to visit the JouleX IT Blog. We hope you'll join us on Facebook or Twitter and subscribe to our RSS Feed!  We look forward to joining you in the Green IT conversation!