Dell endows management appliance with power usage controls

The new release of the KACE K1000 Management Appliance, now officially a Dell-branded product, offers features that lets businesses configure and enforce the power management settings on both Window and Macintosh OSX hardware.

Chip Lawson, Dell KACE senior product manager, says that companies can realize significant savings in their electricity bills by paying more attention to their desktops. He references a company in the United Kingdom that he says already is saving $120,000 per year by managing just 700 systems.

K1000 produces reports about these energy consumption reductions that could be used to claim energy efficiency rebates from your utility company. Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's calculator, Dell KACE figures you can generate around $77,000 in power saving per year by managing 1,000 desktops. (So, Lawson's sample beta customer, Royal Liver Financial Services, must have been doing something really right or electricity is just way more expensive in England.)

Of course, power management isn't the only new feature in the appliance. K1000 also includes service desk features that were modeled after the Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices framework. It also includes the ability to apply "Smart Labels" for group-managed systems, which means you can get more granular about managing certain sets of systems dynamically.

The base cost of 100-node K1000 appliance (include all the add-on features) is $8,900. The technology has been in release beta for about two months, so it already is generally available, according to Lawson.

One last thing, which also is important from a power management standpoint: Lawson says that if you're trying to reduce the physical footprint of your hardware, you can buy the new systems management tool as a virtual machine. The same pricing policies apply.