Faronics Power Save and Newport Independent Schools
The Situation
Newport Independent is a school district located in Newport, KY, and is composed of three elementary schools (grades K-5), a middle school (grades 6-8) and a high school (grades 9-12). In addition, Newport Independent provides preschool services to children from birth through age five, and GED course work for adults through its Alternative Learning Center. The district has 250 staff members, and has a student enrollment of approximately 2,200 students.
Newport Independent’s IT infrastructure is comprised of 900 workstations and 20 servers.
The Problem
When Newport Independent decided to implement a formal district-wide energy policy, Rusty Adams knew he had his work cut out for him. As the district’s Lead Technician, it was his responsibility to ensure that the district’s computers were in compliance with the new energy policy. Rusty also knew that the current practice of leaving the computers on during weekdays and only turning them off during weekends was going to have to change.
Newport Independent’s past experiences with the basic power saving settings provided with the operating system were less than positive; the power saving settings offered little flexibility, and often the computers would stop responding. As a result, the district disabled the computer energy saving settings and relied on shutting computers down manually at the end of a school week.
The problem was that this practice was no longer feasible. Shutting down 900 computer workstations is extremely time-consuming, but since Rusty and his team were only doing it once a week, it was manageable. With the new energy policy in place, Rusty and his team would have to shut the computers down manually every day—a task which Rusty knew was just not possible. Rusty needed a solution that balanced the needs of the district’s energy policy, IT personnel, and computer users.
The Solution
After searching for a solution on the Internet, Rusty came across Faronics Power Save. Intrigued with Power Save’s features and benefits, Rusty decided to include Power Save in his research that involved comparisons with other products and actual software evaluations. Newport Independent found Power Save to be the best fit for their needs, and proceeded to initially deploy Power Save in their computer labs, which accounts for roughly 300 computers.
“We chose Power Save because of cost and the fact that it did not require SMS, which we are still getting implemented at this time.” says Rusty Adams. “It has freed up the time and resources of IT because we trust Power Save to shut down the labs for us in order to satisfy our district’s energy policy requirements.” Newport Independent currently has their computers configured so that the workstations are powered on only during school hours, while the monitors are set to power down after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Rusty plans to reduce the time required before implementing power saving measures in several phases so that he can measure the optimal point where user needs and the district’s needs are balanced.
“Having strong technical support is always an important factor when deploying software across several labs,” says Rusty. “Our experience with Faronics’ technical support team has been great— they’ve got some great ideas on how we can better integrate Power Save into our computing environment.”
Newport Independent is currently working with their router and switch vendor to improve their Wake-on-LAN functionality. Currently, Newport Independent can only wake machines that are on the same subnet as the Power Save Console. By enabling the directed broadcasts feature on their switches, Rusty and his team will be able to control their multi-site Power Save deployments from a single location.
“I am looking forward to having this completed soon,” says Rusty. “A key part of our plan is for Power Save to wake the computers early in the morning for antivirus scans and Windows updates in order to improve the end-user experience. We want to do this through Power Save because it’s easier for us to fine-tune this process through its console than it would be to rely on setting auto-start times in each computer’s BIOS.”
The Benefits
Energy Savings
Power Save’s energy management features were able to bring the district’s computers in line with Newport Independent’s energy policy. The benefits are not only financial, but environmental too. The less energy that the computers use, the smaller the carbon footprint they create.
Centralized Control
Power Save provided Newport Independent with the control they needed over their workstations. With Power Save, Rusty and his colleagues are able to power up, power down, and sleep computer labs with ease. They can also monitor the power status of each of the labs.
Workstation-based Solution
Since Power Save is a workstation-based solution, it does not require any server hardware to operate. This is a significant cost and energy saving for Newport Independent, as the addition of a new server is counter intuitive to reducing financial and energy expenditures.
Enterprise-wide Reporting
Power Save features built-in power consumption reporting that details how long workstations have been powered on, powered off, and how much energy and money is being saved based upon the regional electricity cost.
About Power Save
Power Save uses intelligent energy management to ensure workstations are available when system resources are required, but conserving power during productivity downtimes. Power Save provides organizations with real financial and energy savings on every computer deployed, as well as centralized workstation power status control. Plus, Power Save is environmentally responsible and offers a complete return on investment within the first year of deployment. Since Power Save is an energy-saving technology, it can qualify for rebates from local utility or government organizations. Advanced features include real-time savings reports, policy scheduling, and customizable activity settings based on CPU, disk, and application activity.
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