At one time, the only thing that really mattered when benchmarking Web servers was performance. But performance as a sole measure of servers has gone the way of the muscle car era, and the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is changing its tools as well. This nonprofit benchmarking group, a de facto United Nations for IT vendors, has released its next generation of software for measuring both the performance and power use of Web servers.
The software, SPECweb2009, is an updated version of software released in 2005. The earlier version measured performance alone; this release measures power as well, a reflection of the energy cost concerns that have risen over the last four years, said Rema Hariharan, the chair of the SPEC web power committee and a senior member of the technical staff at AMD.
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"It is important to understand not just the maximum performance of any server, but what you are getting on a per-watt basis," said Hariharan.
The measurement assesses three different workload levels involving simultaneous user sessions. One, an e-commerce workload, can measure at six different levels to report on total system power -- including how much energy disk drives are using -- to give a performance per watt measurement. Two other workloads, for banking and support, also measure performance per watt, but not at multiple levels.
The SPEC software will also separate results from PHP and JSP scripts. It can measure any size server, but not a system with multiple servers such as a blade system. Work on finding ways to measure blade systems is under way and may be ready in six months, said Hariharan.
The vendors represented on the specification committee are from AMD, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Sun Microsystems. The non-profit SPEC charges $1,600 for new licenses of SPECweb2009, $800 for upgrades and $400 for eligible non-profits.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently released an Energy Star rating metric for servers that are up to four sockets. It measures the efficiency of the power supply and the amount of power consumed at idle.
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