Verdiem system saves Staffordshire University £27,000 in power costs

Staffordshire University has cut its power costs by deploying a PC power management system across its campus.

The university has four main campus sites, two in Stoke-on-Trent and two in Stafford, along with other satellite sites. The university has a total on-campus population of around 20,000.

As part of its ongoing green initiative the university has deployed the Verdiem Surveyor system to help reduce power wastage across its estate of more than 4,000 PCs used on site by staff and students.

Jay Burke, a senior IT officer at Staffordshire University, said: “Using Surveyor we saw an immediate saving of 60% on student PC power usage and 25% on staff PCs. We’re now on course to achieve a full return on our Verdiem investment within a single year.”

Verdiem says Surveyor enables organisations to centrally control and reduce the energy used by PCs on their network by up to 60% "without impacting either end-users or existing IT processes".

A 60% cut in student PC power used is worth around £27,000 a year to the university.

Burke said Surveyor is proving to be "highly flexible", allowing the university to design "policies" for each different set of PCs according to usage, whether it is for staff, students, or for specific faculties such as the media department, which needs to run PCs continuously for high performance video or rendering applications.

Verdiem says that when switched on, an average PC draws 65 watts of electricity, three watts when suspended (on standby), and one watt when turned off. Each monitor also draws 35 watts when on, two watts in sleep mode and zero power when off.

Intel recently announced a new technology suite called Small Business Advantage which takes advantage of specific features baked into the company's processors to maintain and secure PCs, including power management.