– Dr. Joe Polastre, CTO and Co-founder at Sentilla (www.sentilla.com), says:

Metrics in use today tend to be application performance metrics, not energy efficiency metrics. These include things like transactions/second and users served per system.

What are the right metrics for energy efficiency in the data center? Metrics from the mainframe days are coming back, such as MIPS/watt and bits/kWh. Supercomputers are still benchmarked using MIPS/Watt, but when we moved to distributed computing we lost a lot of these benchmarks. Organizations like spec.org are trying to bring them back, and they’re a first crack at deriving the true energy efficiency of applications/systems in the data center.

Data center managers need to be educated about metrics because it is financially responsible, lowers a company’s bottom line, and delays capital expense of new data center facilities due to increased application optimization.