Power Management of Devices

The United States Environmental Protection Agency created the Energy Star® guidelines for computer products to encourage the use of energy-efficient computer systems and to reduce air pollution associated with energy generation. To meet these guidelines, Sun hardware is designed to use power efficiently. In addition, power management software is provided to configure the power management settings.

For more information about power managing your system, see your specific hardware documentation or power.conf(4).

Power Management of Fibre Channel Devices

Power management of Sun systems has been provided in many previous Solaris releases. For example, the internal drives on the following systems are power managed by default:

• SunBlade 1000 or 2000

• SunBlade 100 or 150

• SunBlade 2500 or 1500

The default settings in the /etc/power.conf file ensure Energy Star compliance and fully support power management of these systems.

The following adapters connect external Fibre Channel storage devices:

• Sun StorEdge PCI Dual Fibre Channel Host Adapter

• Sun StorEdge PCI Single Fibre Channel Network Adapter

If a combination of the above adapters and Sun systems are used to attach external Fibre Channel storage devices, the external storage devices will also be power managed by default.

Under the following conditions, power management should be disabled:

• If the system has Fibre Channel attached disks that are connected to a storage area network (SAN)

• If the system has Fibre Channel attached disks that are used in a multi-initiator configuration, such as with the SunCluster software

• If the system is using IP over a Fibre Channel interface (see fcip(7D))

Power management should not be enabled when more than one Solaris system might share the same devices, as in the above conditions.

You can disable power management for the system by changing the autopm keyword in the /etc/power.conf file as follows:

autopm 		disable

Then, reconfigure power management by running the pmconfig command or by rebooting the system.

For more information, see power.conf(4) and pmconfig(1M).