Frequently Asked Questions

NightWatchman provides a solution that allows you to save energy immediately.  In organisations that leave PC’s on 24×7 for management purposes, a significant amount of energy is wasted overnight.  To illustrate this, a PC and monitor in idle state are using between 80w and 200w depending on the technology in use.  This is equivalent to between 2 and 5 lightbulbs. With energy saving now at a premium, NightWatchman assists organisations with automatically powering down this infrastructure when not required.

How are energy savings achieved?

NightWatchman provides centralised, reliable and secure shutdown and wakeups of workstations automatically. This saves as much as R250 per annum per PC on energy costs.  Over and above this, the solution comes out of the box with a full reporting pack that allows you to track energy, co2 emissions and costs within your organisation.

Features of the product include:

• Powers down or logs off PCs across an enterprise
• Protects unsaved user data prior to shutdown
• Wake on lan with no network changes required
• Produces reports to calculate current and potential future energy savings
• Controls PC Power Scheme settings
• Schedules daily, immediate or once off shutdowns
• Controllable with any systems management tooling as well as through its own console
• Energy, cost and co2 emissions reporting
• Product performance reporting

Improving IT operations

NightWatchman actually enhances the IT operations of an organisation.   By being able to power manage devices, NightWatchman ensures that devices are available for patching and by regularly powering down workstations, administrators can ensure that important security patches are applied.

Energy saving

Information Technology has been at the forefront of innovation and business efficiency in literally every industry  since the advent of readily accessible computing in the 70’s.  Hence, IT needs to take a leading role in the largest challenge facing our species at the moment, namely global warming and climate change. In short, the advent of Green IT.

If one examines the issues we face at a macro level, we really need a 3 pronged attack to survive as a species and IT needs to play a significant role in all of these:

1.  We need lots and lots of abundant clean energy, which is affordable.

There is no doubt that moving to clean energy, be it renewables or nuclear (don’t discount this) is going to be more expensive than the cheap carbon we have today.  This however should not become a hindrance in pursuing this objective.  IT’s role in this paradigm shift, moving to a low carbon economy, will be paramount.  Smart green energy is the only way forward and technology will enable this.

2. We need to continue to pursue energy efficiency to ensure a sustainable future.

If we assume that energy is going to get expensive, the only way to ensure sustained growth and get the majority of the world’s population out of energy poverty is to ensure that we become more efficient.  In simple terms, do more work with less energy that is more expensive.  If we fail to achieve this, we will hinder economic growth and ensure that poverty persists.  The major consequence will be that poverty stricken communities that cannot afford ‘expensive clean energy’ may pursue dirty energy strategies.  So becoming more efficient is critical and in reality underpins what IT is all about.

The use of technology is almost always around becoming efficient.  The simple task of turning a bit on or off is actually about doing a piece of work more efficiently, be it a calculation, word processing or getting your companies books out earlier than ever before.  From a business perspective, IT is a large consumer of energy and making the service you deliver as an IT professional more energy efficient will become more and more important as the cost of energy continues to escalate.

3. We need to conserve our natural resources.

It is all well and good getting access to clean energy and becoming more efficient, however, if we don’t continue to manage, conserve and preserve our natural resources, the future of our species on the planet is questionable.  We have to continue to look after our water resources, our oceans and our natural wilderness.  These are critical to ensuring that our biome remains in balance and will ensure that water and food security do not become threats leading to conflict.  Again, the role of technology in monitoring the effects of climate change and managing these rapidly decreasing resources will become key.  Taking this further, moving to ‘birth to birth’ manufacturing processes which reutilise raw materials after usage will again be driven by advances in design driven by technology.

Business Apathy towards sustainability (and sustainable IT)

Business in many instances is still apathetic towards global warming and climate change.  The most common excuse is the responsibility to the shareholders to make money.  If we continue to hold that view, we are on a very slippery downhill slope into oblivion.  However, even if we do work within these confines, there is not a single shareholder that would not agree with efficiencies that lower costs and improve the bottom line?  You would struggle to find a shareholder that would fight against improved market perceptions of their business leading to financial growth?  Few shareholders would prevent an organisation lowering their tax liability by lowering their carbon footprint, or improve their global market competitiveness by reducing the carbon intensity of their manufactured product.

The steam train that is the ‘low carbon economy’ is actually nearing the station.  It may have already arrived and ‘green IT’ is one of the carriages.

The role for the IT Department and sustainable computing

If we accept that we are entering a paradigm shift, and that technology is going to be a key enabler moving forward, then the IT department and the role of IT is going to become more and more important.  IT is going to be the change agent to drive efficiencies in organisations.  IT will enable companies to measure where they are and build plans to make improvements.  IT will be the means whereby companies will become ‘smart’.  ‘Smart’ in respect of all aspects of the business from, logistics to facilities management, manufacturing processes to full dematrialisation of carbon intensive business processes.

The ‘smart’ CIO is the leader who is going to realize this sooner rather than later and start to lead these initiatives in the boardroom.  Never has a more telling opportunity faced IT before than what the low carbon economy brings.  The opportunity for IT in many organisations is to move up the value chain and be at the forefront of business strategy and business leadership.  The change within the next 10 years is going to be enormous and companies that will win in this new economy will be the innovators, innovation led and driven through technology.

1E WakeUp which is part of the 1E agent ensures that all PCs targeted for software distribution are turned on and ready to receive it, reducing the chance that a PC will miss a vital patch. Because you can guarantee that each PC will be available when it is needed, the total power consumption of the enterprise will be reduced (as PCs can be powered off when not in use).

The software uses a combination of standard ‘Magic Packets’ and an agent service to enable Wake-On-LAN to function over networks which do not support directed subnet broadcasts.

Although 1E WakeUp can only be used to turn PCs on, it can be used in conjunction with another 1E product, NightWatchman, to turn off PCs. NightWatchman can turn off PCs on demand, or according to a schedule, thereby reducing power consumption. It also saves any open documents thereby ensuring that no data is lost during the shutdown.

1E WakeUp and NightWatchman can be purchased together as a cost effective power management and software updating solution – the Power & Patch Management Pack.

Benefits

• Dramatically improves user productivity by ensuring every user has a healthy, well performing PC
• Proactively checks PCs, identifying issues and automatically remedying them
• Dramatically reduces downtime and guarantees 100% patch deployment success
• Supports almost instant delivery of software and patches across an entire network
• Integrates seamlessly with NightWatchman to deliver round the clock PC power and patch management
• The most scalable solution available today; we have several customers with over 300,000 licences
• The only solution of its type to achieve Common Criteria for IT Security (CC) Assurance