The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), a nonprofit corporation that establishes and endorses standardized benchmarks, has released a new benchmark, SPECsip_Infrastructure2011, to evaluate the performance of Session Initiation Protocol servers.

SPECsip_Infrastructure2011, now available on a CD for $800, is expected to be used by developers, testers, performance analysts and purchasing decision-makers.

As the benchmark is based on a proxy server modeling a VoIP deployment, SPEC SIP subcommittee chair Erich Nahum noted that users can benefit from SPECsip_Infrastructure2011 in multiple ways. The primary benefit for users would be the ability to compare the performance of competing SIP servers in a VoIP environment.

These comparisons, he said can be made through results posted on the SPEC website by either running the benchmark as it is or by customizing the benchmark workload so that it is keeping with the local environments.

Apart from using it for performance comparisons, SPECsip_Infrastructure2011 can also be used as a tool to optimize server provisioning.

Nahum enumerated the benefits for vendors and noted that SIP software vendors would be equipped to evaluate and improve performance of their server products while hardware vendors could use it to determine how well and to what extent their servers withstood VoIP workloads.

Initial studies on user behavior patterns have been done by Communicgate Systems and IBM (News - Alert). The primary metric for SPECsip_Infrastructure measures how many subscribers it can simultaneously support while ensuring quality of service requirements.

SPEC SIP membership comprises more than 70 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies worldwide. Future releases from the SPEC SIP subcommittee are expected to focus on SIP applications and the Java SIP container.

TMCnet reported that SPEC released the first beta version of the Server Efficiency Rating Tool that is expected to address the requirements of the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star for Servers v2.0 specification. The tool produces detailed information about the influence of CPU, memory and storage I/O configurations on the power consumption of servers.