Introduction on SWaP - More Information
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.
- Performance: Using industry-standard
benchmarks.
- Space: Measuring the height of the
server in rack units (RUs).
- Power: Determining the watts consumed by
the system, using data from actual benchmark
runs or vendor site planning guides.
This innovative metric gives you an effective
cross-comparison and total view of a server's
overall efficiency. Armed with this information,
you'll be able to accurately compare the
performance of different servers and determine
which ones deliver the optimum performance
for your needs. SWaP will help you better
plan for current and future needs and control
your datacenter costs. It's the perfect tool for
accurately evaluating horizontally scaled
deployments for the delivery of web and
transaction services.
Measuring Performance
Use numbers provided by a recognized benchmark
body or actual in-house, real-world workloads.
One word of caution: estimates from competitive
vendors often use workloads and configuration
parameters that aren't within the platform's
optimum design.
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. If they don't publish
the numbers be sure to ask them why the
numbers are not more obvious.
Calculating Space Needs and Total Cost
Datacenter racks are expensive real estate,
filled with an assortment of servers, switches,
communication equipment, storage arrays,
wireless routers, WAN switches, backup
power supplies and more. All these devices
compete for available space and contribute to
the cost of powering and cooling the data center.
That's why the true economic value of a server
is determined by the performance it delivers
per unit size and the power it consumes.
The SWaP metric effectively and accurately
projects and calculates server efficiency in rack
dense deployments, which impacts data center
capacity, performance and costs, while providing
imperial proof points for the new generation of
servers. As the industry continues to demand
higher performance, better price/performance
and performance per watt or per Rack Unit,
over total cost, the SWaP metric will give you
the tool you need to accurately and efficiently
scale your network infrastructure to meet your
datacenter's growing needs.
With the SWaP metric you'll have a quick and
easy way to accurately predict the efficiency
of a server and the impacts of deploying that
server over your project lifecycle. It gives you
the freedom to do more with less by choosing
power and space efficient servers that reduce
overhead cost. The bottom line: it can help
save millions of dollars that can be better used
to increase your company's business value and
competitive advantage.
