2009/06/11
TheRegister: Web servers get 'leccy bill
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, or SPEC for short, has been providing benchmarks for PCs and servers for more than two decades, and in the past year, it has been adding power components to its benchmark suites. SPEC and server players AMD, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems have got together and created a new power-aware web serving benchmark called SPECweb2009.
This new test is a companion to the SPECpower_ssj2008 test that debuted in December 2007, and it's probably going to be the workload that is used to measure servers that get the Energy Star for servers seal of approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
AdvertisementThe SPECpower_ssj2008 test is meant to emulate a typical business-class Java application stack, and it exercises processors, cache, memory, and processor scalability in multiprocessor systems. Tweaks to the Java stack and the operating system can also help boost performance on the test, but this is true of all benchmarks.
The SPECweb2009 test, by contrast, is designed to emulate Web server performance, and it's actually comprised of three different workloads: an online banking application with SSL encryption, an e-commerce online store with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted transactions, and a tech support site with lots of downloads not using SSL encryption. This is the same set of applications used in the SPECweb2005 benchmark, but the addition of power measurements changes the nature of the test, so results are not comparable. SPECweb2009 also allows for either Java or PHP to be the language used on the Web application server.
Both SPECweb2005 and SPECweb2009 run all three workloads in sequence a box, but as is the case with the SPECpower_ssj2008 test, SPECweb2009 runs at different system loads - from the peak number of sessions (100 per cent capacity) down to idle (0 per cent, but still burning electricity just sitting there) in increments of 20 per cent of the peak sessions - and measures the power consumed and throughput at each loading. The final rating on SPECweb2009 can be either peak throughput (the average of the banking, e-commerce, and support workloads) or a power metric that is calculated by adding up the sum of the performance on the e-commerce workload and dividing it by the sum of the watts consumed in each band.
Let me give you an example so this makes more sense. Take the Fujitsu Primergy TX150 S6 server, which is a single-socket Intel box using a quad-core L3360 processor. Fujitsu configured this entry tower server with 8 GB of memory, six 146 GB 10K RPM drives, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 with the ext2 file system and with Accoria Network's Rock Web Server 1.4.7. This puppy server could handle a maximum of 27,300 sessions on the banking application burning 188 watts at the system level; 32,300 sessions on the e-commerce application burning 185 watts; and 14,100 sessions on the support application burning at 176 watts. (See, power consumed really is dependent on the workload). So the official SPECweb2009_JSP_Peak rating for this box is the average of those three numbers, or 23,167 users at 183 watts.
Now, for the official SPECweb2009 power rating, you drill down into the e-commerce test. While for the peak number of users - which was 32,300 - the power consumed by the Fujitsu server was 186 watts, the machine burned 117 watts just sitting there with an idle operating system and middleware stack. At 20 per cent of peak (6,460 users), the machine burned 144 watts, and every additional 6,460 users added another 10 watts or so until it went a little wiggly above 60 per cent of load. The end result is a SPECweb2009_JSP_Power rating of 103 users per watt.
The only other machine tested using the new web serving benchmark so far is an HP ProLiant DL370 G6 rack server using two top-end Intel W5580 "Nehalem EP" processors (that's eight cores in total) with 96 GB of memory plus 29 15K RPM disks, all but two of them in external arrays. (The SPECweb2009 test has to measure the power used by external disk arrays, so there's no cheating there). This machine used the same software stack chosen by Fujitsu above.
While this two-socket Nehalem EP box from HP could do more work - it had a SPECweb2009_JSP_Peak of 95,634 users - it took an average of 725 watts of wall power to support that peak performance on the three workloads (this box idled at 496 watts). Still, the HP had almost the same performance to power ratios on the e-commerce test, and it came out with the same SPECweb2009_JSP_Power rating of 103 users per watt. ®
InfoWorld: OpenSource World offering free admission
by Chris Kanaracus
Organizers of the upcoming OpenSource World conference broadened the event program and are offering free admission, hoping to attract more attendees in a time of slashed travel budgets and increased competition from similar shows.
The conference was previously known as LinuxWorld. This year's event is scheduled for Aug. 11-13 in San Francisco's Moscone Center.
Key topics will include Drizzle, a database project based on the MySQL codebase, mobile development, and security, said event chairman Don Marti. The CloudWorld and Next Generation Data Center events will run concurrently with OpenSource World.
But perhaps the most telling change is the decision to drop admission charges for qualified IT professionals and to instead gain revenue solely from sponsorships.
Organizers have implemented a qualifying process in order to weed out marketing staffers from vendors that aren't exhibiting at the show, but might be interested in attending to check out the competition, Marti said.
"The kind of people the program committee wants to reach are those hardcore sysadmins and working IT managers," he said.
"We want them to get something out of it that they can take back to the office," Marti added. "This is not just a high-level strategy show."
What's not yet clear is how many such individuals the event will attract, given that the global economic recession has put a damper on tech trade-show attendance overall in recent months.
Current attendance figures for the event, which is backed by IDG World Expo, a division of IDG News Service's parent corporation, weren't immediately available Thursday.
"Every show in the whole IT market is in trouble," Marti said. "Travel budgets are tight and training budgets are tight.... This show's affected by the same conditions as other shows."
There is also a great deal of competition from other open-source events, such as LinuxCon, he added.
But OpenSource World nonetheless has "a good long-term story," he said.
CNet: What's your identity fraud risk level?
by Elinor Mills
Like many people, I'm worried about identity fraud. Not paranoid, just generally curious what the chances are that I could be victimized by things like mail theft. Sure, I could sign up for one of the fee-based identity fraud monitoring services like LifeLock or Debix, or I can get a credit report that might give me some clue that a credit card has been taken out by someone else in my name.
Now there is a Web site that offers an assessment of a person's identity fraud risk for free.
The My ID Score site was recently launched by ID Analytics, which offers corporations and consumers services to protect them against identity fraud.
The site scans the company's ID Network, billed as the largest identity fraud database in the U.S., to see what types of activities and transactions have been made in your name. It looks at hundreds of variables and data points and then looks for anomalies, such as credit card applications on the same day with different addresses or pre-paid cell phone purchases in a short period of time, said Thomas Oscherwitz, chief privacy officer at ID Analytics.
The site focuses on transactions that use your personal data and does not look at account fraud in which someone uses your stolen credit card or in which your credit card data was stolen in a network breach at a payment processing company, for example.
"We look at events within the network, such as whether someone is using your information to apply for credit cards," he said.
I tried the site out and am happy to report that my score was 63, indicating low risk. Most people fall within the range of 1-450, which is considered moderate risk, according to Oscherwitz. A score of 600 and above is considered high risk, he said.
The site asks for basic information such as name, address, phone number, and date of birth. It also asks for Social Security number but does not require it (I passed on that as I avoid giving out that most sensitive piece of personal data if I can).
The site then asked a series of multiple choice questions that the legitimate Elinor Mills would know, things like identifying cities I've lived in, addresses, phone numbers, and middle initial.
Once the score is displayed, the site offers information for how to obtain free copies of a credit report and offers links to other sites with information about identity fraud and companies that offer monitoring services.
For consumers whose score is high the site partners with the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center to provide more information about what underlying data triggered the score, Oscherwitz said.
