by Steve Hansell

Created on: August 28, 2010   Last Updated: September 14, 2010

Adding Enterprise Power Management is one way a CIO can impact the companies bottom line. Positive ROI is an important aspect of new projects as CIO's and infrastructure managers try their best to keep costs down and the IT department strategic in the companies success. By managing power consumption, the cost of computing can be lower and real saving passed on to the business.

There is pressure now to be a good corporate citizen and conserve energy whenever possible. This initiative is active among a large percentage of business in America today. Saving power on computing can yield numbers that are significant and make a good story for clients and business partners alike.

The average savings from a Power Management suite can be as much as 60 dollars in energy costs per machine per year, and are usually run from an enterprise wide console  that delivers power management policies across different locations, keeping management costs down as well.

When modeling that savings across the entire network, these can be some convincing numbers.

A Power Management application can access client computers and turn them off and on by looking for several different thresholds (i.e. time of day, idleness of platform, vacation schedules). Since many of the needed security and operation patches are applied at idle times, the power can be synchronized to have a "Wake-On-Lan" event so that critical patches can happen at off hours.

When considering if power management is important in your enterprise, take more than money into the conversation. Power Management is a way to meet "Green Initiatives" that not only save on costs, but lower the overall carbon footprint of the business. That is good for the environment, but is also good for customer relations. The marketing department will find value in touting that to potential customers and may be the bit of information that lands the sale.

Just like many applications today, there are "freeware versions" of power management available today. They have their advantages, like lowering initial costs, but not clearly having a support mechanism can be very frustrating, time consuming, and, in the end, prohibitively costly. Many times, the cost of purchasing a solution will end up being a much better deal, especially at some point when you absolutely need some one to help you figure out what is going wrong.

Vendors also spend a great deal of time and money looking for vulnerabilities in their products. They will alert you to needed

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