Rambam Health Reaches Full ROI With PowerPlug PC Energy Saving Software
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Rambam Healthcare Campus has implemented PowerPlug Pro, a leading PC power management solution, on more than 2,000 of its computers.
Since launching PowerPlug Pro in November 2009, Rambam Healthcare Campus has seen a phenomenal return on its investment, with an ROI of less than 4 months. The system has since generated savings of more than 5 times its cost.
“PowerPlug Pro has improved our IT and business efficiency by identifying and reducing costs in hardware, energy consumption and IT staff time” said Mrs. Sara Tzafrir, Rambam Healthcare Campus’ CIO.
“In addition to drastically reducing PC idle time, PowerPlug Pro has significantly increased the power-saving awareness of our thousands of employees. Some of our users have started to switch off their PCs when leaving work”, says Mr. Yaron Leibo, Rambam’s Chief Electric Engineer. “It resulted in savings of about 2% of our huge electricity bill in 2010”, added Mr. Leibo.
PowerPlug Pro was installed and configured in less than a week, starting to generate savings immediately. From within a simple, easy-to-use central console, PowerPlug Pro agent software was installed and configured on more than 2,000 computers across the Rambam Healthcare Campus. It has been optimized for a hospital environment with a mix of on-site, remote and emergency computers spanning a complex network.
Rambam Healthcare Campus increased its initial energy savings by implementing PowerPlug Wakeup Portal, which enables end-users to remotely wake up their PCs. “PowerPlug Wakeup Portal allowed us to implement power savings on PCs that require remote access. We can now cut energy consumption on hundreds of additional PCs by enabling their users to power them up whenever they want to, from wherever they are.” adds Mrs. Tzafrir. Rambam was able to save an additional 100MWh annually by further tuning PowerPlug Pro’s saving policies to reduce the power consumption of computer displays.
The power management project enabled the Rambam Healthcare Campus to achieve over three times return on investment within the first year, reducing its power consumption by more than 600 MWh and preventing 350,000 kg of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere.

BGU selects PowerPlug as PC Network Power Management Software
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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 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 power management solutions. “There are dozens of departments and schools at a large university like BGU, meaning that there’s something going on on some PCs at all times. We can’t just shut computers down” continued 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 her 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 her own department or school, adapting a power savings policy that would best fit the needs of her 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 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 tweaks 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 17:00, BGU achieves savings of over 50% in PC electricity consumption, preventing over 250 tons of CO2 from being emitted to the atmosphere.

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There are few organizations whose array of personal computers (PCs) is as complex and varied as that of Clalit Health Services. Clalit’s 30,000 PCs are distributed across nearly 2000 locations, ranging from 5-person clinics to 1000-bed hospitals, with hundreds of pharmacies and corporate offices in the mix.
Clalit selected PowerPlug Pro to manage the electricity consumption of its challenging PC environment. From the get go, following a successful trial rollout on several hundreds of computers, PowerPlug Pro’s flexibility and adaptability emerged as the key success factor for Clalit’s cost-cutting targets.
CIO of Clalit Health Services, said “Clalit Health Services is committed to reducing the environmental impact of its operations, and PowerPlug Pro goes a long way to help us meet our emissions reduction goals. It is an intelligent solution for the massive waste of energy that results from unused computers. We expect PowerPlug Pro to bring us substantial savings, especially in light of recent electricity cost increases. We chose PowerPlug Pro after evaluating several products, due to its richness of features, its adaptability to heterogeneous PC environments, and the unmatched degree of savings it delivered at reference customers and in our trials.”
Eyal Yechieli, CEO of PowerPlug Ltd, added “We are proud to have been selected for nationwide deployment at Clalit Health Services. PowerPlug Pro is set to achieve significant savings at Clalit, in large-scale environments ranging from corporate offices through to medical emergency departments. Our solution will also give the management of Clalit Health Services visibility of power consumption and savings, and of the resulting cost and carbon emissions reductions.”
Although a single PowerPlug Pro server could manage all of Clalit’s PCs, Clalit and PowerPlug devised a distributed architecture, with a total of 5 PowerPlug Pro servers. A single server was designated to manage 20,000 PCs distributed in over 1,400 clinics nationwide, another server was allocated for over 10 medium-sized hospitals, two more servers were used to separately manage Clalit’s largest two hospitals. Finally, Clalit’s corporate PCs were assigned another server.
Clalit then set out to distribute agents on its PCs, using both standard software distribution tools (SMS) and PowerPlug Pro’s internal agent distribution mechanism.
A critical stage of the rollout project was creating power saving plans that are adapted to the needs of different parts of the organization. PowerPlug and Clalit cooperated to optimize savings plans for the maximal achievable savings without interrupting users. Critical PCs were identified and excluded from power savings, and dynamic exclusions were also put in place – a PC running certain medical software, for example, would be excluded from power savings until that software would be exited.
With agent rollout under way and tailored power plans configured, savings on a mass scale began.