IT Going Green and Making a Difference in More Ways

This is a 1E customer who not only uses our NightWatchman software to save electricity and subsequently reduce their own carbon footprint in doing so but they are also saw a return on investment of of less than three months on a project that also included our user self service product Shopping and services to design and implement SMS.  In the long run they are going to reduce the amount of carbon emitted into the environment by 1 metric tonne annually and their head count is only 4,500 employees.  Other benefits they will realize are faster and easier application delivery to the end users, and less IT staff costs by implementing SMS and Shopping, all along side NightWatchman.

I was not involved in this project personally, but I can tell you that with all of my customers who use NightWatchman they are not only saving millions of dollars on electricity each year and saving the planet at the same time but when they add our other software solutions like 1E WakeUp with our custom Wake-on-LAN solution and the much imitated Client Health patching of computers is much faster and reaching a patch level of 100% compliant is not only possible but now the expectation, add in our branch distribution software Nomad Enterprise and the fear of sending a package over a link and hoping it doesn’t saturate the pipe is gone, no longer can the Network admin’s point their finders at the SMS or ConfigMgr if their traffic shaping doesn’t quite work, Nomad has dynamic true bandwidth throttling built in that handles any change in network traffic, oh the stories I could tell.  And then when you add Shopping in and you never have to worry again about getting those frantic phone calls from your manager or director telling you to stop what you were working on “…because the department head of X is leaving for the airport in 45 minutes and has to have the latest version of Visio and PowerPoint installed on their laptop before they go, and I mean right now!  Create the package and ad thing you do. No, I have no idea what their computer name is why?  Oh, and make sure they have the right service pack and all the patches installed with those too!  We can’t have them getting infected.”  Because with Shopping that department head could sit in their chair open up their browser, select Visio and PowerPoint from the list of application on the Shopping portal and in just a few minutes it would all be installed while they were checking online to make sure they had the best seat for their return flight next week, all without ever contacting IT!

My customers scale, as far as client numbers, are almost always in excess of 100k so I get to design and test some very interesting solutions.  Hierarchies are very large and complicated, not to mention the sheer size of the IT operations and the risk associated with making changes to the computing environment and processes.  But when the design is complete, and we have checked every box indicating that all of the PoC tests are a success, and all requirements have been met, and I produce a report telling them how much they are going to reduce their carbon footprint and save on electricity, that they no longer have to worry about traffic shaping to make sure an SMS distribution doesn’t cause a network outage, that we meet and exceed application delivery to the end users where service level agreements are measured in seconds not days, and they are finally going to get the client fixed on all those computers where it hasn’t worked for no one knows how long, all they can do is smile in disbelief and ask me why they didn’t call sooner!  

So I can attest to this case study being factual even though I didn’t work on the project because I have seen it all with my own customers using the 1E products and services.

PeterboroughCaseStudy.pdf

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

Microsoft MVP System Center Configuration Manager

http://configmgr.com

© Anthony Clendenen

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Hibernation Hotfix for Windows XP and Vista and Insomnia Madness

I have read of reports where systems will not resume from hibernation but have not seen it replicated myself.  Well if you have seen this problem in your environment this patch, released on April 7th by Microsoft (KB 951126), may be just what the doctor ordered. 

Insomnia? Ambien…

I have also heard reports of a software vendor that claims to have a patch for a situation they refer to as insomnia.  They claim that a bug in the Windows operating system will actually prevent the system from going into hibernate and have a patch to fix it. 

In reality there is no bug and here is what happens.  In the power scheme settings there is a specified time for the system to go into a low power state after n minutes of idle time.  Idle time is when there are no keyboard inputs, mouse movements or changes in window focus, all actions typically performed by the user.  Once the computers idle timer expires the OS will go into a low power state but before that it will query running applications to see if they are busy doing anything and if any of them respond with a "Yes, I am still working!"  the idle timer gets reset and the system stays in its current power state.  The idle timer will reset to n minutes and when it expires it will check again. 

This process is actually handled by SetThreadExecutionState function, which allows application to respond to this request with various values to be able to complete their tasks.  So not only is this not a bug in the OS, if there is a bug it lies in the application that is incorrectly responding and keeping the OS from going into a low power state or it truly is working and needs the computer to stay up.  The whole idea is to keep applications from crashing, causing a BSOD or worse a RSOD and corrupting files.  And personally, the only patch I am going to install for my operating system is going to have to come from Microsoft, I will apply patches from vendors for their own software but if they issue a patch to fix another vendors software I would be a bit concerned to say the least.

More technical details of the function can be found here on msdn.

If you are coming to MMS see you in just a couple weeks!  You can find me hanging out at the booth or in sessions.  I will actually be putting on a couple demos during the week at our booth as well.

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E

http://configmgr.com

© Anthony Clendenen

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