SWaP (Space, Watts and Performance) Metric

Introduction to SWaP

The challenge: The "Participation Age" is putting increasing demands on your data center.

Evaluating a new server for your data center is no longer simply a matter of measuring raw performance. With today's increasing demands, you also need to consider how much power, air conditioning and space a server consumes. While traditional metrics are good for calculating throughput, they don't consider these new power and space demands in the equation.

What's driving this new challenge? We call it the Participation Age. Buyers and sellers want to participate in new ways. They want to be connected and access more services and information in many different ways. With the explosion of wireless devices, voice and data convergence and the increasing use of web applications, data centers are under pressure to deliver more services, transactions and data to more devices. And it's just the beginning. Demand for these new services is growing exponentially.

That's why Sun created SWaP--the Space, Watts and Performance (SWaP) metric.

How SWaP Works

In the example above, Server A and Server B produce equal performance, however Server A is half the size and less than half the power of Server B. Using the SWaP formula, it is revealed that Server A is over 5X more efficient than Server B--providing a huge impact to rack dense deployments in your data center.

Calculate Your SWaP

Calculate Coolthreads' potential for yourself using the SWaP metric for measuring system performance and efficiency.