Leaving PCs on overnight costs companies $2.8B a year

SAN FRANCISCO — Even during an economic meltdown, when companies are scrambling to cut costs, businesses are wasting billions of dollars by leaving their PCs on at night.


U.S. organizations squander $2.8 billion a year to power unused machines, emitting about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide — roughly the equivalent of 4 million cars — according to a report to be released Wednesday.

About half of 108 million office PCs in the USA are not properly shut down at night, says the 2009 PC Energy Report, produced by 1E, an energy-management software company, and the non-profit Alliance to Save Energy. The report analyzed workplace PC power consumption in the USA, United Kingdom and Germany.

Wastefulness does not just affect a company's bottom line, it creates environmental concerns, the report says. If the world's 1 billion PCs were powered down just one night, it would save enough energy to light the Empire State Building — inside and out — for over 30 years, it says.

"Workers do not feel responsible for electricity bills at work, and some companies insist PCs remain on at night so they can be patched with software updates," says 1E CEO Sumir Karayi. He says 63% of employees surveyed said their companies should take more steps to save PC power.

"It is scary how much energy is wasted," says Michael Murphy, senior manager of global environmental affairs at Dell, a business partner and customer of 1E. It has used 1E software to efficiently manage its 50,000 PCs globally, saving about $1.8 million a year.

Simply shutting down PCs at night can save a company with 10,000 PCs over $260,000 a year and 1,871 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the report says.

"PCs can be a tremendous drain on electricity," says Doug Washburn, an analyst at Forrester Research. "During a nine-hour workday, it isn't always in use because of lunch, meetings and other things."
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SANDISK intros world's first Button Backup USB flash drive

EW DELHI, INDIA: SanDisk Corporation today launched an innovative new family of SanDisk USB flash drives in India, including the world's first backup USB flash drive with simple backup software activation at the touch of a button.


The SanDisk Ultra Backup USB is the first offering of the company's new SanDisk Ultra USB product line. With capacities up to 64 gigabytes1 (GB), the SanDisk Ultra Backup USB flash drive is designed to protect computer users' photos, music, videos, personal and business documents, and other types of digital files, with the simple touch of a button without the need for any software installation. The drive protects onboard digital content with a dual layer of security, including password-protected access control and ultra-secure AES hardware-based encryption.

The new SanDisk USB product family includes three different product lines:

* The SanDisk Ultra Backup USB flash drive offers the added protection and peace of mind that consumers expect from the minds behind flash memory.
* The popular SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive which provides simple, reliable and portable storage, plus access to a variety of U3 applications.
* The SanDisk Extreme Contour provides increased security protection and higher performance levels, enclosed in a sleek, elegant industrial design.

SanDisk Ultra Backup USB Flash Drive: Back up critical files with the simple touch of a button With no cables required, or any complicated software to install, the new SanDisk Ultra Backup USB flash drive is a complete backup solution that provides an incredibly easy way to protect digital files. It uses patent-pending backup technology with capacities up to 64GB, large enough to back up average consumer requirements, as well as critical small business files and documents. In addition to one's digital personal life, these products protect critical work files with a dual layer of both password protection and AES hardware encryption. This ensures content stays private and secure (via data scrambling at the flash controller level) when the drives are either physically removed for portability, or stored away for safe keeping.

The explosion in global sales of laptops and mobile devices has exponentially increased the vulnerability of digital files. Computer users can quickly lose precious photos, music, videos and professional work files due to drops, spills, theft, viruses and other incidents. PC Magazine (www.pcmag.com) conducted a research study on annualized notebook failure rates published in July 2008 which found that more than 24 percent of business notebooks need repair each year due to failures.



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Samsung: Solid state will match hard-drive price

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

Solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips as the storage medium, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives. But they cost more. Currently, opting for an SSD instead of a hard-disk drive will add anywhere between $100 and $600 to the cost of a laptop, depending on the capacity of the SSD.


Dell's Alienware Area-51 laptop (above) and Dell's Studio XPS 16 come with a 256GB solid-state drive option

Dell's Alienware Area-51 laptop (above) and Dell's Studio XPS 16 come with a 256GB solid-state drive option
(Credit: Dell)

In a phone interview, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, said reaching price parity with hard-disk drives is just a matter of time. "Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year," he said. "Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years." Samsung makes both SSDs and HDDs.

Beard explained why a cost gap persists between solid-state drives and hard-disk drives. "The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables," he said. "To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn't really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive." (The price for most laptop-class hard-disk drives on the market is between $60 and $100 at retail, Beard said.)

"When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive," according to Beard. "But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly. For example, if the spot price of the flash chip itself is $2, a 64GB drive is going to cost $128 just for the flash and then you would add the fixed cost of the PCB and the case, he said. So, the cost will double as you double the capacity, according to Beard.

This argument, however, works in favor of lower solid-state drive pricing too--as flash memory prices drop and densities and capacities increase. And Beard added that "there's a lot of pressure for OEMs (PC makers) to match the price to the traditional pricing in the hard-drive industry." Samsung is also a PC maker and faces the same pressures.

And what will happen to the price of SSDs this year? "The rest of the year is quite unpredictable. Because the SSD price is directly tied to the price of flash, no one knows. Everyone is just giving their best guess as to what will happen in the flash market," he said. To date, flash memory prices have dropped so much that chipmakers can't make money.

"Every major flash manufacturer posted major losses in Q4. So flash and SSD manufacturers are under a lot of pressure to make a profit," Beard said.

Where is the price-per-gigabyte sweet spot for solid-state drives going to be later this year? "On the business side, the sweet spot is 64(GB) moving to 128. On the consumer side it's definitely 128 moving to 256," he said.

Samsung SSDs with a capacity of 256GB have been shipping since January. Dell offers these drives in some laptop models already. 256GB drives are just now "rolling out into mass production," Beard said. "We'll start shipping it to some of our smaller customers about right now."

Note: Currently, on a Dell Studio XPS 16, opting for a 128GB SSD instead of a 7200rpm 320GB HDD adds $200 to the price of the system. Opting for a 256GB SSD adds $400.


Brooke Crothers is a former editor at large at CNET News.com, and has been an editor for the Asian weekly version of the Wall Street Journal. He writes for the CNET Blog Network, and is not a current employee of CNET. Contact him at mbcrothers@gmail.com. Disclosure.

Wall Street Economics

By Robert Johnson

March 6th, 2009 - 3:08pm ET


Young Chuck, moved to Texas and bought a donkey from a farmer for $100.

The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day. The next day he drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad news. The donkey died."

Chuck replied, "Well, then just give me my money back."

The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."

Chuck said, "Ok, then, just bring me the dead donkey."

The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"

Chuck said, "I'm going to raffle him off."

The farmer said, "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"

Chuck said, "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead."

A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?"

Chuck said, "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $898.00."

The farmer said, "Didn't anyone complain?"

Chuck said, "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back."

Chuck now works for Morgan Stanley in their OTC Default Derivative Department.

Sun, Rivals Seek New Uses for Flash-Based Storage

By DON CLARK.WSJ.03/10/09

Chips called flash memory that have transformed many consumer products are beginning to shake up corporate computer rooms, with Sun Microsystems Inc. emerging as a surprise innovator.


The computer maker, though it lags rivals in data-storage hardware, has been pushing a redesign of servers and storage systems to take advantage of flash-memory chips. In its latest gambit, Sun is trying to popularize a tiny circuit board that can squeeze more flash chips, saving money, space and electricity.

But other companies are pushing rival flash-based products, which are emerging as one of few bright spots as corporations scale back their technology buying because of the recession.

"It's been growing extraordinarily fast, so it's a major focus area for us in 2009," said Bob Wambach, senior director of high-end storage marketing at EMC Corp., which added flash-based storage systems in January 2008.
[sun microsystems flash memory] Stec Inc.

Flash-memory chips became a mainstay of portable devices like iPod music players because they retain data when electrical current is switched off. They are also faster than disk drives; flash-based alternatives called SSDs, for solid-state drives, allow computers to boot up and retrieve files quickly.

Speed improvements in disk drives have been slower. So companies that need high performance have faced costly options.

They include expensive drives that spin at very high speeds, and arrays of drives that store data near the outside edge of disks so it can be fetched quickly.

Companies such as Stec Inc. and Texas Memory Systems Inc. began offering storage modules based on flash memory for military and commercial customers with specialized needs. Such products have gotten more affordable, as competition among chip makers to serve the much larger consumer market has caused prices to plunge. EMC uses such "enterprise" SSDs, as they are called, as does Sun in storage systems it introduced in November.

The price of flash-based technology remains high. Jim Handy, an analyst at the research firm Objective Analysis, estimates that a 500-gigabyte hard drive costs makers of storage systems around $50, where an enterprise SSD that stores 32 gigabytes would cost them $3,000. Factoring in the speed difference, however, the flash-based technology is less expensive in terms of the cost of handling transactions per second, he estimates.

Another concept is to use flash memory as a kind of accelerator. Backers of the approach include Fusion-io and Violin Memory Inc.; Texas Memories is offering a similar product Tuesday.

But some customers worry that flash chips can fail if data is written and erased too many times. Addressing that issue was a major focus of Michael Cornwell, who helped Apple Inc. develop flash-based devices such as the iPod and joined Sun in 2007.

Mr. Cornwell, Sun's lead technologist for flash memory, approached chip makers that include Samsung Electronics Co. to modify their products. The companies estimate the collaboration brought a five-fold increase in the endurance of Samsung's flash chips.

Rather than simply replacing hard disks, Mr. Cornwell favors new combinations that exploit DRAM and two kinds of flash chips -- one best at reading data, and another at storing it -- along with high-capacity disk drives. He estimates such a "hybrid" storage pool fetches data 3.2 times faster than conventional alternatives and save electrical power.

Sun also plans to produce compact servers with no disk drives. "We have some really compelling designs coming out," Mr. Cornwell said.

Sun is proposing that other companies follow its lead in installing flash chips on circuit boards measuring about 69 millimeters by 30 millimeters, less than a third the size of a typical drive-sized SSD. This "open storage module," also allows air to flow more efficiently to cool servers, Mr. Cornwell said.

Gene Ruth, an analyst at the Burton Group, notes that other companies have their own ideas about the best way to exploit flash technology. But the right combination could produce "a killer product that will change the industry. And I think that Sun has a leg up there," he said.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com