EMC’s key strategy for 2010 and beyond remains the optimization of information infrastructure for virtualized environments to help maintain cost savings, increase information availability and leverage new advanced functionality with shared storage for improved resource utilization to deliver unified solutions for the next generation Data Centers.
Did your appointment bring new directions for EMC?
Within the South African context we will be enhancing our focus to gain more market share into the Public Sector through more enablement of our strategic BEE Partners. Naturally we will build upon our strong position in the Telco, Financial and Commercial sectors where the demand for Cloud Computing is growing.
Recently, EMC partnered with Cisco and VMware to create a virtualized computing environment (VCE) in the region. What is EMC’s role in the alliance and how it can address the migration to private cloud infrastructure?
The VCE Coalition realises that Cloud computing requires a great deal of cooperation between the three Vendors to make the joint vision a reality.To help to accelerate the VCE strategy, EMC is combining its extensive resources and complimentary expertise to bring fully tested, proven and supported solution sets to market that enable our mutual client set to gain momentum on their journey to Cloud computing.
How is private cloud computing supporting the African business environment, in your opinion?
VCE Private Cloud solutions directly and positively impacts upon the total cost of ownership of projects, through significant consolidation, dramatically reduced operational cost through the delivery of pre-configured proven solutions, backed by detailed solution implementation best practice documentation. The African business environment has to find ways of increasing speed to market at reduced capital costs, with less resources, since there is a significant shortage of skill on our continent.
In a nutshell, our journey is one that will benefit the entire African continent.
What are the company’s most recent projects, apart from the VCE coalition?
This week at the EMC World conference in Boston EMC is making a number of significant announcement on solution sets for Microsoft Application virtualization, new advances for SAP to address optimization for the new generation data centers.
New “unified” storage platforms offering multiple connectivity options, and more.
How do you see the African ICT environment in the next five years, in terms of networking architecture, virtualization and data centre management?
New generation network connectivity and wider use of smart telephony will be very positive for wider demand for application services, all of which will be driven by greater virtualization. End-to-end “dashboard” based management applications for virtual environments
How are EMC’ solutions contributing to the reduction of carbon footprint in Southern Africa, including the VCE infrastructure?
Advances in automated storage tiering enables less valued information to be moved to larger capacity disk with slower performance which in itself means small physical foot prints save power, combined with techniques such as auto “power down” when units are not in use also has a significant positive impact on carbon footprint. Greater use of “solid state” flash dish – that has no moving parts also reduces heat and power consumption.
Denisa Oosthuizen, ITNewsAfrica.com
