Ben Gurion University, Israel’s 4th largest university, uses PowerPlug Pro to cut PC power costs by over 50%.

A leader in developing and implementing green technologies, when Ben Gurion University (BGU) identified the power consumption of its personal computers was a major energy sink, it sought energy-saving solutions to minimize the environmental and financial costs involved. “We evaluated various solutions that employ different approaches to power savings” said Mr. Alon Goldin, BGU’s Head of IT. “We tried command and control software, various Microsoft tools, and a number of dedicated power management platforms.”

BGU’s diverse academic environment posed challenges for other power management solutions. “There are dozens of departments and schools at a large university like BGU, meaning that there’s something going on some PCs at all times. We can’t just shut computers down” continued Mr. Goldin. “Introducing power management software meant we would need complete control over when a PC would be powered down. Even if a user is not sitting by their PC, that PC may be running computations, simulations, data transfers or other processes that cannot be taken down. As an IT group, we also need 24/7 access to PCs, for support and software update purposes.”

Another requirement for rolling out PC power management at BGU was distributed management. Due to the different user activity profiles, each departmental IT administrator needed to be able to define and manage power savings for their own department or school, adapting a power savings policy that would best fit the needs of their end users and IT activities. At the same time, centralized reporting was needed to see the big picture – to monitor, understand and optimize the savings generated by the system.

“We selected PowerPlug Pro after thorough research and evaluation” added Mr. Goldin. “It answered our complex requirements for maintaining critical processes, uninterrupted while achieving significant savings, and for letting us delegate management tasks to the administrators in different academic units. We verified the savings reported by PowerPlug Pro by carefully measuring and monitoring actual electricity use at our facilities. Moreover, PowerPlug’s dedication to the process and their extensive experience in saving power helped us tailor and tweak our savings plans.”

PowerPlug Pro was deployed on both public computers (at libraries and classrooms) and private computers (staff and faculty PCs) at BGU. Even when not configuring savings during daytime, and applying a savings policy only after 5:00 PM, BGU achieves savings of over 50% in PC electricity consumption, preventing over 250 tons of CO2 from being emitted to the atmosphere.

Home to more than 20,000 students, Ben Gurion University of the Negev is a leader in research in hi-tech, cyber security, arid zone agriculture, solar energy, water resource management and other disciplines. BGU has taken upon itself the responsibility to care for a cleaner and better quality environment as part of the “Green Campus” project, an initiative of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which aims to implement sustainability and environmental responsibility in higher education institutions.