SWaP - Fair Use

SWaP Fair Use:

Use the following guidelines to ensure that your SWaP results are as accurate and consistant as possible when measuring server and data center metrics.

• Measuring Performance: Use numbers provided by a recognized benchmark or actual in-house, real-world workloads.


• Determining Power Consumption: Use a power meter that records the total watts used by the system during the test run. Be sure to use the same configuration used to produce the benchmark results. To avoid inaccurate measurements, it's important to take the 'steady-state' power measurement that calculates usage over the duration of the entire run. If you don't have a power meter, check with your vendor.
  
  Ensure that environmental conditions remain at a steady state when taking power measurements from your servers under test. Variances in temperature, humidity or air flow will compromise results.
  
  When comparing to Blade servers, ensure the power consumption of both the blade and associated chassis is included in calculations, otherwise you will underestimate the actual power required for the Blade server solution.


• Measuring Size: Size refers to the height of the server under test, measured in Rack Units. For rack-optimized servers, this specification can be found easily by reference to vendor websites and product information.
  
  For blade servers, the user should normalize the size of the blade to accurately represent the height required.  To do this, divide the height of the chassis / shelf by the number of servers that can be installed into it.  For example, if a chassis/shelf is 5RU in height, and can accommodate 10 blade servers, then the normalized size of the blade server is 0.5 RU.