Introducing the First Benchmark Standard for IoT

We have reached a point where virtually every electronic device can be connected to the internet and interact with its surrounding environment. The explosive growth of the Internet of Things shows no signs of slowing down, and in fact, may actually be speeding up. We have already seen new businesses created, existing ones destroyed, and new insights derived from analytics, creating a competitive advantage for organizations which can collect large datasets and parse them, to glean actionable insights. This process is transforming every industry.

The unique qualities of the IoT introduce new challenges, in particular, how to characterize performance and total cost of ownership (TCO). Critical to the success of IoT deployments are the IoT gateway systems. These systems are positioned between the devices at the edge of the network and the back-end data center. They perform functions such as data aggregation, real-time analytics and persistent storage.

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is announcing the TPC Express BenchmarkTM IoT (TPCx-IoT), the industry’s first benchmark for measuring the performance of IoT gateway systems. TPCx-IoT was developed to provide the industry with an objective measure of the hardware, operating system, data storage and data management systems for IoT gateway systems. TPCx-IoT was specifically designed to provide verifiable performance, price-performance and availability metrics for commercially available systems that typically ingest massive amounts of data from large numbers of devices.

The TPCx-IoT benchmark models a continuous system availability of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. TPCx-IoT can be used to assess a broad range of system topologies and implementation methodologies in a technically rigorous, directly comparable, and vendor-neutral manner.

Developing an industry standard benchmark for a new environment like IoT required the dedicated effort of experts from many companies. I would like to express my appreciation for the contributions of: Andy Bond (Red Hat), Bhaskar Gowda (Intel), Chaitanya Kundety (Huawei), Chinmayi Narasimhadevara (Cisco), Da Qi Ren (Huawei), David Grimes (Dell), Hamesh Patel (Intel), Jamie Reding (Microsoft), John Poelman (IBM), Karthik Kulkarni (Cisco), Ken Rule (Intel), Meikel Poess (Oracle), Nicholas Wakou (Dell), Matthew Emmerton (IBM), Mike Brey (Oracle), Paul Cao (HPE), Reza Taheri (VMware), and Tariq Magdon-Ismail (VMWare).

I envision TPCx-IoT will be a useful benchmark standard for buyers in terms of performance, price/performance and energy efficiency as they evaluate new systems for Hadoop deployments. Vendors will find it equally useful as a way to demonstrate the competitiveness of their products. The specification and kit are publicly available for download via the TPC’s Web site at the following URL: http://www.tpc.org/tpcx-iot/.

TPC Press Release

Sincerely

Raghu Nambiar, Chairman TPC IoT