Greening Corporate Networks with Sleep Proxy

In a corporate network, most desktop machines always are left on, even when they are not in use for extended periods, such as at night. This is wasteful, bad for the environment, and bad for the corporate treasury. While Win7 provides aggressive sleep functionality, most users override it because they occasionally might want to access their machine remotely. Ideally, a desktop would go to sleep when not in use and awaken seamlessly when the user tries to access it. We have built a system to enable this. Our system consists of a sleep server that maintains the network presence of the sleeping machine and seamlessly awakens it on remote access. We do not require special hardware or changes to existing software. Our system is operational in Building 99 and has resulted in substantial savings in terms of money, power consumption, and carbon-dioxide emissions.

Date:
Speakers:
Aman Kansal, Michael Goraczko, and Neel Joshi