In the article written by Jeffrey Clark, Peter provides a number of reasons why organisations should seek a holistic approach when planning datacentre requirements. "The problem with focusing purely on 'traditional' metrics such as density and energy efficiency is that they are typically focused purely on the infrastructure layer and ignore what's happening at the application and business layers." What's needed, according to Peter, is a system that goes beyond such isolated metrics to consider the relationship between, for instance, energy efficiency and business performance: "If you analyse the volume of business transactions flowing through a set of infrastructure components along with power consumption, you can determine the energy required per business transaction. This is more relevant than a purely infrastructure-focused metric, as it relates energy efficiency to the business." Read the full article on Data Center Journal here> Find out more about Sumerian's analytics approach to datacentre consolidation and virtualisation>