New SPEC benchmark tool measures server muscle and watts

At one time, the only thing that really mattered when benchmarking Web servers was performance. But performance as a sole measure of servers has gone the way of the muscle car era, and the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) is changing its tools as well. This nonprofit benchmarking group, a de facto United Nations for IT vendors, has released its next generation of software for measuring both the performance and power use of Web servers.