If you work at an office, I'm sure you are familiar with the problem. When people turn their pc off it disappears from the network. The result; people keep their pc's on, even when they're not at work. According to UC San Diego researchers, 50-80% of a modern building's electricity use goes to IT equipment, particularly desktop computers. Not shutting down PCs equated to $2.8 billion in wasted electricity in 2009 allone.

Microsoft brings us a great solution, a sleep proxy system that maintains a PC's network presence even when it is turned off or put into standby mode. "A number of studies have noted that most office machines are left on irrespective of user activity," Microsoft researchers write in a paper titled "Sleepless in Seattle no longer." "At Microsoft Research, we find hundreds of desktop machines awake, day or night – a significant waste of both energy and money. Indeed, potential savings can amount to millions of dollars per year for larger enterprises."

This new Microsoft app allow machines to be turned off while keeping them connected to the network, waking the machines when a user or IT administrator attempts to access it remotely.

"We are not aware of any paper detailing the deployment of any of these proxying solutions in an operational enterprise network on actual user machines," Microsoft said. "This is disconcerting: systems that work well on testbeds often encounter potentially serious challenges when deployed in operational networks."

Read more at PC World

Via Treehugger

Image credit BC.net