A power consumption analysis of decision support systems

Enterprise data warehouses have been doubling every three years, demanding high compute power and storage capacities. The in-dustry is expected to meet such compute demands, but dealing with the dramatic increase in energy requirements will be challenging. Energy efficiency has already become the top priority for system developers and data center managers. While system vendors focus on developing energy efficient systems there is a huge demand for industry-standard workloads and processes to measure and analyze energy consumption for enterprise data warehouses. SPEC has developed a power benchmark for single servers (SPECpower_ssj2008), but so far, no benchmark exists that measures the power consumption of large, complex systems. In this paper, we present a simple power consumption model for enterprise data warehouses based on the industry standard TPC-H benchmark. By applying our model to a subset of 7 years of TPC-H publications, we identify the most power-intensive components where research and development should focus and also analyze existing power consumption trends over time. This paper com-plements a similar study conducted for enterprise OLTP systems published by the same authors at VLDB 2008 and the Transaction Processing Performance Council's initiative of energy metric to its benchmarks.