SearchDataCenter.com has a post on TPC’s efforts to introduce benchmarks for energy consumption (performance per watt) and virtualization.

TPC eyes energy consumption and virtualization benchmarks

By Bridget Botelho, News Writer
06 Nov 2008 | SearchDataCenter.com

Last month, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) marked its 20-year anniversary by offering vendor-neutral processing performance benchmarks, disclosing plans for future benchmarks and offering a workshop for end users along the

Currently, the TPC's four active benchmarks are TPC-C and TPC-E for online transaction processing, TPC-H for decision support for ad hoc queries and TPC-App for business-to-business transactional Web services.

And now, in an effort to keep pace with data center initiatives to improve energy consumption and to green IT, TPC plans to offer benchmarks that include energy consumption metrics.

"TPC is currently working on a specification for how to measure and report energy consumption within existing TPC performance benchmarks," said Mike Molloy TPC's chairman. "TPC-Energy will measure the total energy to complete a certain amount of computational work. It will also allow users to measure the power consumed when systems are idle."

TPC discusses how their benchmark will be better than VMmark.

Benchmarking in a virtual world
Future TPC benchmarks will also include guidelines for measuring workloads in virtual environments. TPC hopes to devise a measure of virtual server performance in the same way physical servers are measured.

"There is no reason these benchmarks can't be run in a virtualized environment, and most of our benchmarks will include guidelines on how to measure workloads in virtual environments in the next updates," Molloy said. "With virtual servers, you can have more than one on a physical server, so reporting the performance for all the virtual servers on a physical server is where the rules must be defined."

To date, however only virtualization provider VMware Inc. offers a virtualization benchmarking system, which is called VMmark. The TPC's benchmarking system will be more flexible than VMmark, according to Molloy.

"VMmark requires a fixed set of applications and guest OS to be run (called a Tile). That configuration is not allowed to be changed. We would allow different combinations and a number of applications/Guest OS," Molloy said.