Staffordshire Uni Reduces PC Power Use By 60 Percent

Staffordshire University has reduced its students’ electricity usage by 60 percent since it deployed power management software across 4,000 PC’s on its network.

Verdiem’s Surveyor solution has saved the university the equivalent of £27,000 a year and will achieve a full return on its investment within the first year of operation, simply through automatically switching PCs off or managing them into a low-power state when they are not in use.

Immediate Savings

The figures were the results of the first measured period since going live. The software was deployed as part of an effort to control rising electricity costs and to strengthen the university’s green initiative drive.

“Verdiem’s Surveyor solution has enabled us to quickly and easily save energy across the university’s 4,000-plus PC estate,” said Jay Burke, senior IT officer (client tech and app) Information Services at Staffordshire University. “Using Surveyor, we saw an immediate saving of 60 percent on student PC power usage and 25 percent on staff PCs. We’re now on course to achieve a full return on our Verdiem investment within a single year.”

Verdiem’s Surveyor was chosen following a competitive tender and successful pilot deployment with the university eventually ordering 4,000 licenses. The software enables organisations to remotely control and reduce energy without impacting users or IT processes.

“Surveyor is proving a highly flexible solution – allowing us to design ‘policies’ for each different set of PCs according to usage – whether it’s for staff, students, or specific faculties such as our media department that needs to run PCs continuously for high performance video or rendering applications,” added Burke.

Other universities have also investigated ways of reducing their energy use. Cambridge and Leeds universities received a £5.9 million, five-year grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to look into ways into reducing theirs, while Northumbria University has deployed thin client computers across its campus as part of an environmental drive.

Victoria University in Melbourne used IBM’s green technology to build an energy efficient data centre that is expected to save it £204,000 over a 10 year period.

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