Transaction Processing Performance Council Launches Energy Performance Specification
TPC-Energy adds methodologies for measuring Watts per performance to benchmarks
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The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has released its TPC-Energy specification designed to help hardware buyers identify energy efficient equipment that meets both their computational and budgetary requirements.
The TPC-Energy specification outlines methodologies for measuring energy consumption in data processing servers, disk systems, and system components associated with typical business information technology environments.
The TPC-Energy specification was designed to:
- Provide energy usage measurements that a typical customer of a particular benchmarked system would consume. Selected components should be generally available to users and represent the majority of the target market, and the physical environment must be comparable to typical business settings in terms of temperature, humidity and altitude/pressure.
- Provide energy metrics that are comparable between systems under test, for a particular TPC Benchmark Standard.
- Provide for repeatable and documented measurements.
The TPC-Energy specification augments existing TPC Benchmark Standards, including TPC-C, TPC-E, and TPC-H by outlining requirements to measure and report energy metrics in conjunction with each benchmark. TPC-Energy enables manufacturers to provide power metrics in the form “Watts per performance,” where the performance units are particular to each TPC benchmark. As vendors publish TPC-Energy results, customers will be able to identify systems, via the TPC Web site, that meet their price, performance and energy requirements.
“In recent years, the number of global server installations has increased exponentially. The amount of energy required to operate, run, and cool them has increased to keep pace, and energy consumption is now commonly identified as one of the three most important criteria for IT purchases,” said Mike Nikolaiev, chairman of the TPC-Energy committee. “Buyers require an objective method of comparing price, performance and energy consumption in order to select equipment that best fits their requirements. The TPC-Energy specification has been carefully designed to address this need.”
The TPC-Energy specification is available for download at www.tpc.org/tpc_energy/default.asp.