Units of Measurement in IT

Gbps (gigabits per second) is the standard unit for network interface throughput. GBps (gigabytes per second) is used for storage bus speeds. GHz is a frequency unit. GIOPS is not a real unit.

ms (milliseconds) is the standard unit for network and application latency in human-readable SLOs. µs (microseconds) and ns (nanoseconds) are used for CPU-level or hardware-level measurements.

IOPS (input/output operations per second) measures storage device throughput. RPS = requests per second (application layer), TPS = transactions per second (database layer), Mbps = megabits per second (network).

W (watts) measures power consumption. V (volts) measures voltage, A (amperes) measures current. PDU = power distribution unit — rack engineers track watts to avoid overloading circuits.

µs (microseconds, 10⁻⁶ s) is common for in-process or in-memory latency. A DB round-trip is typically milliseconds (ms), making µs-level cache lookups "essentially free" by comparison.