Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority Halves PC Energy Use with Nightwatchman

• Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
• Functional Applications - Enterprise Asset Management Systems (EAM)

• Cities & Municipalities
• Buildings

• Facility Management
• Business Operation

• Building Energy Management
• Remote Asset Management
• Energy Management System

• System Integration
• Software Design & Engineering Services

Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority needed to reduce the energy costs associated with powering end user equipment. It also needed to deploy software patches and upgrades to those machines in a more effective and efficient manner.

With more than $1.1 billion in assets and around 220 employees, Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority owns and manages around 140 heritage assets. It is responsible for some of the most historically and culturally significant waterfront locations in the region such as the precincts at The Rocks and Darling Harbour. The Authority holds sustainability, social responsibility and economic viability at the very core of its management of these sites. Darling Harbour and The Rocks became the first precincts in New South Wales with eco-footprint reduction targets, which aim to reduce the carbon emissions of these precincts by 80 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020. Between them, the precincts attract around 40 million visitors annually.

The Foreshore Authority deployed NightWatchman from 1E across its entire estate of PCs. For maximum impact, it kicked off the project during Earth Hour, a global sustainability movement which started in Sydney in 2007 and now has the participation of over 50 million people across 35 countries. NightWatchman from 1E was used to shutdown all computers automatically at 7pm each day to save on energy costs. With this power policy, any users still working at that time, were able to defer the shutdown, if they needed to complete an important assignment. The NightWatchman system provides the Foreshore Authority’s management with unparalleled reporting, which is based on actual machine make and model power consumption figures and local energy tariffs. This meant that any changes to power consumption could be tracked and details of PC usage patterns could be used to identify where improvements could be made. The WakeUp component of NightWatchman facilitates automatic software patching and upgrades to be done after hours, when energy tariffs are cheaper and with zero disruption to the end user.

• The deployment of NightWatchman by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority has reduced power costs and associated CO2 emissions from computers by 51% since implementation.
• The results of the project were continually communicated to the business. Results were published on the intranet, discussed in project management meetings and made visible throughout the business. This provided a high level of business understanding, ownership and cooperation to keep the momentum of the project going.
• Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority has since continued to make its infrastructure more efficient and sustainable. It has consolidated servers, deployed virtualization, enabled dynamic power management on servers and invested in new ‘greener’ hardware.

• Reduced power costs and associated CO2 emissions from computers by 51% since implementation.