Context: Mike Sharun is the managing director for EMC Canada, a position that offers a unique perspective on the IT market: in addition to its role as a leading storage vendor, EMC is a founder of the Virtual Computing Environment initiative, and has a strong position in the security market through its RSA subsidiary. He recently took time to talk with IT in Canada about virtualization, the cloud, and methods of using efficient IT to reduce carbon emissions.
The following discussion is taken from Mr. Sharun’s interview with IT in Canada CCO Michael O’Neil. We pick up the conversation after a discussion on how current customers are using cloud computing to support test and development – an area in which utilization rates are notoriously low (and as a result, power wastage is high).
Sharun: There’s a huge benefit in terms of moving things into a virtual infrastructure and a cloud infrastructure, in driving environmentals down and having a much greener footprint in terms of IT.
O’Neil: The cycle that connects virtualization, cloud and sustainability is a really interesting one.
Sharun: We’ve really embraced the cloud model from an organization perspective, within EMC IT. We started this journey back in 2004, and we’re going to be fully virtualized by 2012. That’s resulted in a huge savings for our organization. When you start going down this road there are really three phases that you need to address. One is IT production, where you start moving all of your non-mission critical applications into a virtualized cloud environment. Then you go into business production which really entails improving your quality of service, and then the third phase is running IT as a service.
