The SPECweb committee said it will devise a benchmark for measuring web servers' power consumption.

This is on the assumption that power in data centres will double over the next five years and web servers will push a lot that growth.

The benchmark will be based on SPECweb2005, measuring power use for disk subsystems and for web servers using workloads typical of an average system.

IT managers will use the benchmark for evaluation of web server products and for analysing power at different load levels, said SPEC. On the vendor side, AMD, Intel, Sun, HP, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens will participate in developing the benchmark. The committee is also asking other vendors, universities, R&D orgs, end users and others to establish the spec. X