Are You A Green Managed Service Provider?

By Dan Shapero 1

A recent survey by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) of hundreds of professionals reveals work station drainage poses a prevalent power consumption dilemma. Every day, workstations consume power for hours on end, devouring millions of dollars worth of energy. In addition, survey respondents report that 69% of them use more than one workstation and 24% stated that they keep their stations powered on around the clock. For every 10,000 workstations, more than $1.26 million in energy costs is wasted each year. 

According to the survey, desktops are kept on during 43% of non-work hours, including evenings and weekends, to the tune of 55-plus hours a week. This adds an unnecessary $73 to the $150 in energy each desktop uses yearly. Systems management and automation software solutions, like Kaseya’s user state management, are able to proactively force system shutdowns when desktops are inactive, and intelligent chip sets, such as the Intel vPRO, can also force system shutdowns remotely. These solutions can also regulate power consumption during operational hours.

For the MSP, this means considerable opportunities to provide savings for their customers. Especially in today’s soft economy, customers will welcome something that saves money and helps the environment at the same time.  Adding automated power management to an SLA can be an easy way to achieve savings while helping businesses go  green.

Consider the following in your SLAs: the EPA recommends setting computers to enter system standby after 30 to 60 minutes and monitors to enter sleep mode after five to 20 minutes. In addition, reducing the number of workstations for each employee would not only decrease power costs, but hardware costs, application costs and maintenance costs as well. Converting to laptop use could also be beneficial, as the average annual cost for laptop power consumption is only around $23, which is 16% of the energy cost of a desktop. Deploying docking stations for laptops would eliminate redundant desktops.

To down load the EMA research on The True Value of Green IT visit: http://it.kaseya.com/solutions/green_computing.aspx.

Note: Dan Shapero is Senior Vice President, Marketing at Kaseya. Guest blog entries such as this one are contributed on a monthly basis as part of MSPmentor.net’s Platinum sponsorship.