EBay develops ‘miles per gallon’ metric for data centers
There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.
The online auction giant has devised a methodology that looks at the cost of its IT operations in dollars, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions, and ties those costs back to a single performance metric -- in eBay's case, the number of buy and sell transactions its customers make at eBay.com.
The result is a set of data that provides the equivalent of a "miles per gallon" metric for data centers, which organizations can use as a baseline to improve on over time, said Dean Nelson, head of eBay's Global Foundation Services, which manages its data centers worldwide. Read more...
Update: Metric firm changes numbers, Chrome still behind Firefox
Web analytics company Net Applications today changed its May numbers from those posted overnight, and now has Google's Chrome still in third place, albeit barely behind Mozilla's Firefox.
Earlier today, the California-based firm had published data that showed Chrome had passed Firefox for the first time, fueled by an increase of 1.3 percentage points to 20.2%. Meanwhile, Net Applications' preliminary numbers had Firefox falling six-tenths of a point to 19.6%.
The spot swapping came as a surprise: Earlier projections by Computerworld had pointed to a delay in Chrome's capture of second place, perhaps to as late as August.
Later Friday, Net Applications revised its numbers. Read more...