Anil Sedha holds the title of mid-range services and storage supervisor at Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper by circulation.  At VMworld this year he stopped by theCube to talk things over with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante – full video below.

Sedha’s job description covers his responsibility for Postmedia’s backend environment, as well the subscription-based CSM service that the publication is selling. He says that his firm’s journey with VMware started just a couple years ago when the top priority was avoiding the potential negative implications of going virtual, but Postmedia has come a long way since then.

According to Sedha, 65 percent of the newspaper’s infrastructure is now virtualized, and the IT department is currently in the process of implementing VMware in remote locations.

Postmedia runs  HP Eva CX4 960 Dell storage arrays in addition to a few Sun boxes. Sedha, however, says that the emphasis is on the two VNX arrays that the firm currently uses – he revealed plans to migrate from the traditional hardware to EMC’s alternative, and went on to detail a few of the reasons behind this decision.

The executive lists VNX’s agility and sheer number of capabilities – namely automation – as the main advantages. Vellante expanded on this point and noted that VNX was ranked highest by users in not one but two consecutive Wikibon studies throughout the past couple of years.

From the technical standpoint, Sedha also says that VNX and VMware’s software supplement each other. The VAAI vStorage APIs unify storage and compute, speed up replication and make it easier to manage multiple sites, while EMC’s hardware runs better and resolves a lot of the performance issues that Postmedia encountered before.

Check out the full video below for other tidbits from the interview, including the publication’s goals for real-time analytics and Sedha’s tips for Oracle.