Intel® vPro™ Technology

Power Efficiency and Sustainable Information Technology

PC Power Management with Intel® vPro™ Technology

Intel vPro technology offers several ways to impact energy efficiency.

Reliable Wake and Power Up
As we showed in our calculations on energy costs, substantial savings can be realized if desktop PCs are shut down or put to sleep during the non-use hours, typically overnight. This is especially applicable to computers that are used by shift workers in government agencies, financial institutions, or insurance industries, where workers do not typically take their computers home. While businesses could just ask employees to turn their systems off before leaving and then back on when they arrive at work the next day, there are three major problems with this approach.

1. Employees may simply forget to turn their systems off.
2. When employees turn their systems back on when they return to work, they will experience lost productivity while they wait for the system to boot up.
3. The start-up time, or even system performance, may be degraded by system updates or inventories that were not performed during the evening (because the system was off).

By using Intel vPro technology, all of these problems can be resolved. System shutdowns can be scheduled for when employees leave, or they can be delayed if the system is still active. The system can be woken up at a fixed time before the employees return to work. Finally, the system can be woken up during off hours to perform system updates or inventory; it can then be shut down again when these tasks are complete.

In all these cases, Intel vPro technology is used to perform a secure, robust system power-on that is not based on Wake on LAN (WoL). WoL technology is known to be insecure and difficult to manage. Intel vPro technology can also be used to gracefully shut down the systems by using Windows* Management Instrumentation.

How an application is configured for energy efficiency is now emerging as an important area of consideration. As some IT organizations become more application/service centric and less operating system–centric, management applications can utilize Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) capabilities to work directly with the hardware and BIOS to most effectively manage platform energy consumption. The native management capabilities of platforms enabled with Intel vPro technology grant administrators the opportunity to seamlessly integrate manageability with security consoles to help control when and how systems are updated.

Integrated Energy Consumption Data Across the Enterprise
It is imperative that enterprise IT organizations implement monitoring systems to provide a comprehensive view of the energy consumed outside the data center. While the industry focuses on reducing energy consumption within the data center, we recognize the opportunity for reducing energy consumption in the entire office computing environment.

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