How is the perspective towards IT deployment changing?

A major concern that CIOs express today is how they can make IT more useful to the business. An example of this is disaster recovery. If a CIO asks his business when they want information back in case of a disaster, the expected answer is “Immediately.” The CIO would then say, “Immediately would cost you a million dollars.

If you wait two hours, it would cost you USD 500,000; if you wait six hours, it would cost USD 100,000.” The business now understands the value of technology. What the CIO can now do is offer a catalog of services to suit the diverse needs of the business.

How do you see opportunities opening up from the point of view of cloud computing from each of your businesses?

I really don’t see only one part of the business contributing more than the other in terms of opportunities. It really depends on a customer’s maturity in terms of understanding his business priorities. A few years ago, everyone was talking about CRM and how important it was. That is pretty much where we are today with cloud computing.

Everybody intellectually understands that they cannot run their current IT infrastructure the same way for the next five years. Entry to the cloud would be project-based with companies taking the storage/deduplication/security or virtualization angle.

While some companies have either virtualized some or most of their infrastructure, virtualization is a journey that could take them years to complete. In the meantime, they also need to handle evergrowing data volumes; hence, they invest in storage solutions such as SSDs that provide faster performance, and deduplication which helps reduce the amount of information to store.

What R&D initiatives or innovations can we expect from EMC?

One of the innovations is virtual storage wherein we are trying to bring the same type of flexibility to data centers in terms of storage as VMware brought to servers. Virtual storage allows all data centers to be seen as a single pool of storage just as a single pool of servers and data can be moved or offloaded between server and storage depending on utilization levels.

We are working on providing the same capability for moving data center loads between data centers that are within 100 km of each other. We are looking at taking workload movements from within local environments to within metro environments wherein the data center load moves between data centers within a city. We are also looking at taking it to the Geo-level which means moving data center loads between geographic locations.

We are also trying to enable the cloud to manage and store less information through deduplication; to secure the information whether inside the storage array or in motion through RSA’s offerings, and to manage the information through backup and recovery and archiving.

We are investing a lot more in building solutions that run on the x86 architecture since it can be easily virtualized. Two years down the road, there will be a lot more x86 servers than there are today. Virtualization will then be more prevalent.