Green IT
Green IT in Today’s Environment
Why Green IT? Few topics are receiving as much interest it the IT community these days as “Green IT.” Being “eco-friendly” and embracing “Green IT” policies is no longer an objective, it is an imperative. Whether it is being discussed in the context of reducing the cost of electricity by managing power consumption, or as a way to demonstrate a commitment to environmental responsibility, almost every IT organization has some efforts underway to be greener. Reducing carbon footprint, controlling greenhouse gases and demonstrating environmental awareness, when added to the pure financial benefits of saving money with power management, adds up to a big win-win for any organization pursuing Green IT.
Cutting power consumption of PCs is one of the most obvious and common ways of becoming greener. Power management provides direct savings in utility expenditures that by itself justifies the effort. However, the indirect result of reducing power consumption is a smaller carbon footprint, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and a reduction in building cooling load and costs during warm months. Less direct efforts, like reducing the need to travel to remote locations to maintain PCs is another way to further reduce the impact IT has on the environment. The challenge remains doing all of these things efficiently and across an often geographically dispersed organization, while still remaining responsive to user’s needs and usage patterns.
The Solution
Dell KACE Appliances are designed to save you time and your company money by easily and efficiently providing comprehensive Green IT management capabilities that ensure that PCs are always optimized for power savings and resources are consumed only when necessary. They help eliminate travel to remote sites through their remote management capabilities, reducing overall energy consumption, and both appliances are additionally available in virtual form factors to further lower data center power and cooling requirements.
- Using the configuration and policy management capabilities of the K1000 Management Appliance, administrators can easily develop, deploy and enforce power management profiles that control how quickly systems go into low power states. Using the K1000 Power Management Wizard, an administrator can create multiple power profiles that address the unique user usage profiles for both Windows and Mac end users. The K1000 helps IT professionals to monitor power settings via customizable reports, ensuring enforcement and the realization of lower energy costs. In many cases the reports can also be used to gain eligibility for power company rebates.
- Using the Wake-on-LAN (WoL) capabilities of the K1000, administrators can power on systems remotely for after hours patching and updates from a centralized location. This means that maintenance can be performed even on systems that have been powered down and are unattended.
- Reducing the need to make desk-side visits will save organizations a significant amount of time and expense, and for remote locations, will reduce the need to use fuel while traveling to and from those facilities. Both the K1000 Management and K2000 Deployment Appliances have many capabilities which reduce the need for desk-side visits.
- Powerful scripting allows for remote management and software installation and update.
- Remote systems imaging and recovery centralizes deployment tasks for geographically diverse organizations.
- Integrated remote control capability to allow administrators in a central facility to logon and take over remote systems for problem determination, repair and user assistance.
- Remote site replication capabilities allow administrators to manage multi-site configurations from a single appliance, without the added hardware and associated energy costs of alternative multi-server software solutions. These capabilities help reduce the cost and resources required to manage remote sites, and enable companies to control the rising costs of travel to complete systems management tasks.
- For organizations with a VMware virtualized server infrastructure, either the Dell KACE VK1000 Management Appliance or VK2000 Deployment Appliance can be installed as virtual appliances, delivering all of the systems management benefits of a physical appliances without adding to the organization’s power and cooling load while leveraging the space and resource savings of virtual environments.