While vendors continue to add power management features, enterprise IT adoption lags.
SolarWinds partners with Cisco EnergyWise to track energy usage across IP devices, joining a slew of vendors tracking PC power, data center and network device energy consumption.
Powering down PCs and managing data center energy consumption could potentially save enterprise companies a lot of cash, but according to industry watchers, that fact has yet to motivate many IT departments to put the proper processes and tools in place to take advantage of the cost savings.
Forrester Research recently polled IT professionals about their PC power management plans, and while 31% of some 91 respondents have implemented a plan widely, approximately 57% don’t have a project to save on energy consumption in the works. About 12% are currently in the pilot stage with PC power management plans. Among the top reasons cited as barriers to implementation were: end-user intolerance of loss of productivity, uncertainty on which approach to take; and an inability to determine the level of financial savings that could be achieved.
“More than 50% of users enable PC power management policies by simply requesting their users to power down their PC or pre-activate power management settings,” reads a presentation by Forrester analyst Doug Washburn. “Unfortunately, this does not guarantee users will enable these settings or continue to leave these setting enabled over time.”
The seeming resistance to more formerly managing PC power usage and data center energy consumption adoption could be more cultural than technical considering the growing number of tools available today. Vendors such as Symantec’s Altiris, BigFix and Avocent’s LANDesk develop software to offer enterprise IT managers power management capabilities. And companies such as Intel and Cisco also introduced products to manage energy consumption in data centers and across IP devices, respectively.
Now, by partnering with Cisco, SolarWinds is getting in on the energy management game. The vendor recently announced it added capabilities to its Orion Network Performance Manager (NPM) and Network Configuration Management (NCM) to work with Cisco EnergyWise measurement, report and control technology to enable customers to control device power consumption.
“For some time, Orion NPM has been the eyes and ears of our network and the addition of Cisco EnergyWise support gives us even greater visibility and control of our environment. The ability to set policies, monitor and produce reports on our energy consumption, all from the same interface we use to monitor our network’s performance, will save our team valuable time as we implement Cisco EnergyWise,” said Simon Furber, network manager at Brunel University, in a SolarWinds press release.
Do you Tweet? Follow me on Twitter here.
