Table of published power-performance data

Tuesday Jan 13, 2009

Last week, Time magazine had an article "America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency". It was all about how we all need to waste less energy for the same amount of work. That is why Sun is a be proponent of measuring watts on servers on standard benchmarks. Other's try to focus on watts when idle or nearly idle on tiny configurations.

It is really funny that some vendors avoid showing easy to measure power on performance benchmarks at real configurations. Is it that they have a advantage on special configurations and they want to only show that?

I decided to show this graphically, using "0" zero for those that have ZERO information on the measured watts used during the benchmark. What is behind this stonewall of red?

Power-Performance Benchmarks

Benchmarks	Sun	IBM	HP	Dell	Unisys
SPECweb	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPECjbb	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPECjAppServer	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPECmail	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPEComp	Yes	0	0	0	0
Lotus Domino iNotes	Yes	0	0	0	0
Oracle's Siebel CRM 8.0	Yes	0	0	0	0
VMmark	Yes	0	0	0	0
MySQL	Yes	0	0	0	0
ERP	CDA/NDA	0	0	0	0
SPECpower	SPECpower Issues	yes	yes	yes	0

Note customers can get "ERP" power data from Sun under CDA/NDA agreement, as some SW vendors do not allow public display of wattage data measured during the benchmark.

Want more details on Sun's published measured watts, last week I posted "Sun's 2008 summary of measured watts & watt/performance": http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_s_2008_summary_of

Some other thoughts for those really interested in saving real energy:

• Power-management software should be on by default or NOT ALLOWED IN BENCHMARKS!
• Increase server utilisation to most effectively reduce power consumed! Servers are very very inefficient at low-utilisation!
• look at watt-performance NOT perf/watt when comparing servers!
• replace incandescents with CFL lights.

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPECweb, SPECjbb, SPECjAppServer, SPEComp, and SPECpower benchmark name are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. VMware(R) VMmark(R) is a product of VMware, an EMC Company. Oracle, Siebel, registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. More info www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/html/white-papers-siebel.html NotesBench R6iNotes More info: www.notesbench.org

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Posted at 08:17AM Jan 13, 2009 in Benchmark Issues
Tags: lotus performance specjappserver specjbb specomp specpower specweb