FROM THE IGLOO

We all know the various tedious steps involved with setting up Wake-on-LAN to work properly in your infrastructure.  The network card must be WOL enabled. The drivers for the network card must support WOL. The power supply for the computer must supply appropriate current to the network card when the computer is powered down. The system must be configured in both the BIOS and operating system to allow the workstation to be powered on from a sleep state by the network card. Your router must support broadcasting to wake up computers across subnets. By the way, Faronics Core does an excellent job of waking up computers across subnets with its WOL Relay technology as per this article.

But what if you did not want to use WOL? What if there is no network connection available to transmit the WOL packet? Power Save includes a feature we like to call “Local Wake-up” or “Wake-without-LAN” that will allow you to locally schedule a wake-up on the computer. The computer will automatically wake up from Standby or Hibernate mode at the scheduled time – like an alarm clock! Unfortunately, waking from a fully powered down state still requires WOL technology.

How is this helpful? Well, now you can setup your computers to automatically wake up before the employees walk into the door and be ready for their use. If you have any scheduled software updates, you can ensure the computers are awake before the updates take place. Power Save also has the ability to configure multiple power management configurations (Power Policies) for different times in the day, however, if the computer is in Standby mode, the next policy will not be able to take effect. So if the evening policy is to shutdown the computer, the computer will remain stuck in Standby mode. In this case, a Local Wake-up can be configured to wake up the machine prior to the policy change to ensure the next policy takes effect.

In version 4.3 we took this a step further and provided the optional ability to empower end-users to schedule their own computer to wake up from Standby or Hibernate mode. For example, if they tend to start their day earlier, they can setup their computers to automatically wake up everyday – just before they enter the door. They can also defer any further power saving actions for an specified period of time to minimize disruption. In another scenario, if the user is planning to remotely access the computers later that night, they can schedule a wake-up for that evening, otherwise they will not be able to remotely access the computer that has entered sleep mode.

Don’t you think this is a nice alternative to always relying on Wake-on-LAN technology?