Introducing Power Management

BMC Client Management - Power Management allows you to follow the overall energy usage of your devices over specific periods of time, to calculate you energy costs and CO2 emissions as well as to measure the progress about the application of energy consumption policies.

The four steps of power management

BMC Client Management - Power Management is based on the following concepts:

• Each agent can monitor and log system state
• The Event Log Manager uploads results to the database
• The console allows for direct access view on events, as well as consolidated results
• Reports show consolidated results as well as evolution

These allow for the following benefits:

• Adapt power management to Windows Vista (power settings inventory and power settings policies)
• Directly measure and report on power consumption, energy costs and C02 emissions

The power management seamlessly integrates with the BMC Client Management baseline features and creates flexible policies that apply to individual user work styles and organizational needs:

• Power management inventory
  The inventory consolidates the current power management settings of each device and provides hardware inventory with power-oriented classification.
• Power management configuration and application
  The power management configuration enforces power management policies with various levels of settings. It controls settings that reduce power to individual components, for example, turning off monitors and hard drives, after a defined unused time period. It also schedules and activates standby/sleep and hibernation modes for whole groups of devices and shuts down unused computers (that is, overnight) as well as schedules their automatic restart (that is, 5 min before the next expected usage).
• End-user awareness
  The power management functionality allows the administrator to schedule and broadcast "green" messages, reminders, etc. Administrators can also measure and publish effective usage time against overall power on time.

Power management components

The power management functionality is composed of the following components on which you can see detailed information in the following topics:

• Inventory
  The power management inventory is available for both single devices as well as device groups, and provides three different aspects of power management:
  • It displays detailed information about the system power management hardware resources and capabilities of the remote device,
  • it shows details on the global power management policies, and
  • it provides detailed information about the power schemes/plans that exist on the individual devices.
• Configuration
  The power management configuration configures the inventory update and the event logging of the module.
• Operational Rule Steps
  The available operational rule steps allow to configure the module as well as the power settings of the managed devices.
• Reports
  The functionality provides reports, predefined and delivered with the software as well as the possibility to create further custom reports on all possible aspects of power management.

For more information about peripheral device management see the BMC Client Management - Power Management manual on the PDFs page.