The fact that an Aloha State company would seek to lower its energy footprint is no surprise. Hawaii has the highest utility bills in the nation. While efforts to convert to renewables continue, it's been slow going: Hawaii still imports over 90 percent of its energy, and plants there generate the majority of their power from burning pricey fuel oil.
So businesses do anything feasible to reduce their utility bills. And it seemed reasonable that a PC power management tool that would automatically power down the 3,100 computers at Bank of Hawaii when they were not in use would reduce power consumption. About a year ago, when local consultant Green Pacific IT suggested the Honolulu-based bank tap such a system, Bank of Hawaii's CEO and chairman Peter Ho gave the green light to test a recommended product.
The suggested solution promptly failed, however, in a proof of concept. "There were a lot of challenges in getting the product to fully deploy and work in a stable fashion," says Vance Jones, Bank of Hawaii's system manager and vice president. "You'd get some nodes set up and all of the sudden they'd stop communicating to the console and they were hard pressed to tell us why. We only deployed it on 10 machines when we came to the conclusion that if we deployed it to all of them, we were going to run into a lot of problems."
Green Pacific reached out to another PC power management provider, Seattle-based Verdiem, which had yet to formalize a relationship with Green Pacific, but the vendor's Surveyor solution had actually been Green Pacific's first choice. "So we brought in Verdiem in a proof of concept and from the beginning it was easy for us to configure and deploy," Jones said.
Surveyor manages the capability that already exists within Microsoft Windows to turn PCs off or put them into the lowest power state possible that a computer and operating system will support. For instance, Bank of Hawaii doesn't completely turn their PCs off when they're not in use; it uses Surveyor to power them down. The hard drive spins down and the CPU goes into extremely low power cycles, so that there's just enough juice left over for the computers to be "woken up" by Surveyor whenever necessary.
Most PC power management solutions - others include 1E; IBM's BigFix; Data Synergy's PowerMAN; Enterprise Infrastructure Partners' eiPower; and Faronics' Power Save - come with tools that are supposed to compare prior energy costs to that of power-managed PCs in full deployment. Jones was skeptical about such savings projections. The estimates are hard to verify because utilities don't parse usage according to category of specific functions from which energy is drawn, whether it's from lights, air conditioning or PCs, and energy prices fluctuate.
"So for a week we used their solution as a baseline to measure power consumption on a PC," Jones explained. "And then we plugged in a physical watt meter on that same machine to confirm that the amount being saved was actually accurate; and it was."
Since deploying Surveyor to the whole fleet in February, the bank has noticed a decline in energy consumption. Although "it's hard to exactly pin that decline on this solution," Jones says, "we're relatively certain it has contributed to a decline in expenses." Surveyor's reports project the bank is saving more than $13,000 per month and will save $158,400 in annual energy costs.
Surveyor agents installed on all the managed PCs communicate back to a central server console, which the bank has in its data center. That server is used to manage all the instances the bank has deployed (Bank of Hawaii has virtualized the system). But in order to wake up any computers, a couple of PCs must stay running at all times on every local area network segment, of which there's typically one per branch, and one per floor in Bank of Hawaii's back office buildings.
The always-on PCs are the ones that send the signal to the other computers to power up when they're needed. "The signal has to be generated on the same local area network as the PC you're trying to wake up," Jones explained. "It can't come from our data center."
Controlling PCs this way has made the bank's security updates, remote/VPN capabilities, and desktop management (Symantec's Alteris distributes applications and updates to the bank's PCs) more efficient: More than 400 Bank of Hawaii employees, many in the back office, work remotely from home. They use a Web portal to tip Surveyor to wake up their PCs when working in the off-hours.
"Our success rate in deployments has vastly improved," Jones said.
CASEFILE
Bank: Bank of Hawaii
Problem: How to trim sky-high energy costs?
Solution: Deploy software to power down and "wake up" PCs as required.
