With datacenter managers under the budgetary gun while also struggling to squeeze the most efficiency out of their current setups, all eyes are on figuring out ways to assess power consumption. Fortunately, one industry group is proposing a solution: A new benchmark designed to help buyers and IT managers gauge how much power a server requires to do its job. ServerWatch has the story.
The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has announced its newest specification, TPC-Energy, which measures the energy usage of a server to gauge not only transactions per second but transactions per watt as well.
TPC benchmarks are a standard measure of performance used by every major server vendor to boast about the speed of their hardware. The top performers list is constantly changing as vendors release new servers.
But the one thing those lists didn’t discuss was how much energy was burned to achieve those results. Two servers may come within a whisker of each other in terms of performance numbers, but if one vendor needed five times the hardware and consumed five times as much power to get similar results as the other, a buyer might want to know that detail.