Many of us leave our office computers running while we’re away at meetings, on lunch break, and even when we’ve gone home for the day. Not shutting down PCs costs American businesses an estimated $2.8 billion a year. Yet some offices want employees to keep their computers on overnight, for software updates or to keep the machine on the office network so that information can be accessed at anytime. Microsoft researchers have developed a compromise in a new sleep proxy system, which allows a PC to maintain a network presence even when it is shut down or in standby mode.
Microsoft’s sleep proxy system will help cut energy consumption by 60 to 80 percent. This is a pretty big deal when you consider that 50 to 80 percent of a modern building’s electricity use is from IT equipment.
The sleep proxy system is made of two components, SleepServer and SleepNotifier. If your office network were to be equipped with the Microsoft application, SleepNotifier would run on your computer, and would tell SleepServer, which runs on the server end of things, that your computer is just about to go to sleep. SleepServer can then handle some of the requests intended for your computer without “waking” your computer, or can temporarily “wake” up your computer in other cases in which it’s unable to act as a proxy.
To continue the sleep analogy, keeping your computer on overnight is like pulling an all-nighter. Microsoft’s sleep proxy system allows your computer to sleep, and only wakes the machine up when necessary. And once the task is done, your computer can go back to sleep. Sleep is just as good for your computer as it is for you, as sleeping reduces mechanical stress, which extends the longevity of a machine.
The app is still in the research stage, and Microsoft hasn’t mentioned a target release date yet.
A group of researchers presented a paper on SleepServer at the technical conference USENIX in late June, however, and public attention could ensure that the system does make its way into consumers’ hands sooner rather than later. At a time when we’re all looking to cut energy consumption and to save money but have become quite dependent on computers, Microsoft’s sleep proxy seems like just the thing we need.
Source: BecauseAction.com
