TPC Press Release

Contact:
Forrest Carman
Owen Media for the TPC
206-859-3118
forrestc@owenmedia.com

Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) Launches Energy Performance Specification

TPC-Energy enhances the organization’s existing set of benchmarks by adding methodologies for measuring Watts per performance

San Francisco, February 2, 2010 – The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) today announced the immediate availability of its TPC-Energy specification, which has been carefully 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 with the following goals in mind:

• 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.

“Traditionally, benchmarks have focused only on performance and cost, but as data centers struggle to meet demands for reduced energy consumption and utilize new technologies such as solid state disks, energy consumption is becoming an increasingly important metric for measuring the overall efficiency of a particular solution,” said Nik Simpson, senior analyst for Burton Group Data Center Strategies. “The TPC-Energy specification is a welcome first step towards a world where IT organizations can judge solutions based on energy efficiency in addition to features and performance.”

“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 via the following URL: https://www.tpc.org/tpc_energy/default5.asp

About the TPC
The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. The TPC currently has 24 full members: AMD, Bull, Dell, Fujitsu, Fusion IO, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Ingres, Intel, Kickfire, Microsoft, NEC, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Sun, Sybase, Syncsort, Teradata, Unisys, Vertica, VMware and XSPRADA. The TPC also has three associate members: Ideas International, ITOM International Co and TTA. Further information is available at http://www.tpc.org.