FCO owns up to energy waste
Cites 'national security' as reason to leave 10,000 computers on overnight
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The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been leaving about 10,000 computers switched on overnight.
In response to a parliamentary question from shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth, minister Meg Munn said that on the assumption that each computer uses 80 watts of power and is left on for 14 idle hours each day, the department has used an estimated 4 million kilowatt hours of power each year in this way.
This means the overnight powering of FCO computers in a year has been roughly equivalent to the average annual output of a 1.7 megawatt wind turbine, or the electricity usage of several hundred homes.
At 12.12p a kWh, the cost used by the Energy Saving Trust to calculate savings for UK domestic users, the electricity for overnight running would have cost £485,000 annually, although Munn said that power prices vary around the world so a value could not be given.
"It has been our assessment that the risk of lost productivity and the risk to national security that this policy avoids outweighed its cost," said Munn in the answer given on 15 September.
However, in a previous answer to Ainsworth on this subject in June, Munn said that FCO's Future Firecrest IT infrastructure will include low power settings, which use 2 per cent to 5 per cent of full power after a short period of user inactivity. Installation began in March.
"As explained in my earlier answer, the consumption is expected to fall substantially as old equipment is replaced," said Munn in her September statement. "To date, approximately 3,500 new machines have been installed in offices in the UK. Under current plans all 12,000 machines worldwide should have been replaced by 2009. In addition to this, we will be applying global policies to ensure a reduction in power consumption."
This article was originally published at Kablenet.
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COMMENTS
At Defra, they would email round,
and tell you if they needed everyone to leave their PCs on for an update. This didn't happen very often. Otherwise we were under strict instructions to power down before going home. Basically, they couldn't make Wake On LAN work, even when they were able to get up-to-date hardware with XP Pro rolled out to everyone.
@BigYin
No, of course not. When you are dealing with large organizations, you don't have that luxury. Imagine get 10-30 thousand user to manually run updates. Some of these people are the same people who call the helpdesk and say "My internet isn't working" if they mistype a URL. Generally speaking, they aren't stupid, it's just that their strengths are in different areas. I'm not an expert on EEO Law, why would I expect the HR Department to have an understanding about Vulnerability Management?
The Auto Update service reboots after installing any patches which need it. Absent shift work (One of those items that you have to sit down and think about), I generally set the Auto Update function to install those patches at 3AM. Very few users (again, discounting the night shift, which you identify and give a different policy to during the planning phase) complain about their machines rebooting at 3.30ish in the morning. Other edge cases are handled in a similiar manner.
@Mark
You telling me you do not 9at least) disable the ability of AutoUpdate to force a reboot? My; your users must love you!
FWIW all my machine are up-to-date, and they update when I decide they update. When it is appropriate to what I am doing. Not when some wonk at M$ presses the red button.
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