A not-for-profit organization that focuses on developing benchmarks for the IT industry has released the first results of its latest specification for measuring the amount of energy a server takes to perform a transaction. The metric includes energy as well as cost per transaction.

Two HP ProLiant server models were used to create the first results in terms of the new TPC-Energy specification developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council.

\"With the addition of the TPC-Energy specification, direct comparison of all three factors across different hardware platforms is possible,\" TPC Chairman Karl Huppler said in a statement. \"HP is the first company to submit results, but we anticipate more publishes as customers begin to require this information to help them in their purchase decisions.\"

TPC publishes TPC-Energy results and other benchmarks to enable buyers to compare energy efficiency, price and performance of various hardware architectures. TPC-Energy results are aimed to help data center managers identify the most efficient equipment that meets their compute requirements while fitting in their budget.

The council will maintain a top-ten list of hardware units with the best TPC-Energy performance.

TPC currently has 21 full members, representing most of the largest IT vendors, including AMD, Bull, Cisco, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, VMware and others.

There are three TPC benchmarks: TCP-E for brokerage firm online transaction processing workloads, TPC-C for OLTP order-entry workloads and TPC-H for decision-support workloads. Each of the benchmarks simulates the corresponding workload.

HP reported TPC-Energy metrics for its ProLiant DL585 G7 servers with the following results:

TPC-C: 5.93 watts/KtpmC (1,193,472tpmC @ $0.68 USD/tpmC, Availability: 9/1/2010)
TPC-H: 9.58 watts/KQphH at 300 Gb (107,561QphH@300GB @ $1.08 USD/QphH@300GB, Availability: 6/21/2010)
TPC-E: 6.72 watts/tpsE (1,400 tpsE @ $330 USD/tpsE, Availability: 6/21/2010)

The vendor also reported a TPC-E result for the ProLiant DL580 G7 unit, which was 5.84 watts/tpsE (2,001 tpsE @ $347 USD/tpsE, Availability: 6/21/2010).