I see this being of benefit to home users wanting remote desktop, load knows Windows Home Server could do with a decent power management to support remote clients powering up on demand…
Fifty PC users in Microsoft’s Building 99 research facility in Redmond, Washington are testing a new power cutting app. The sleep proxy system, engineered by Microsoft, maintains a computer’s network presence, so it can be accessed remotely if needed, even when the actual PC is turned off or put into standby mode.
Most employees at large companies do not power down their machines because, either they need to access their desktops remotely, or because IT administrators ask them not to so system wide backups can be done overnight. PC World reports, “Sleep proxies allow machines to be turned off while keeping them connected to the network, waking the machines when a user or IT administrator attempts to access it remotely.”