LONDON, 7th March 2006: SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability services, today announced the opening of its second resilient Tier IV[1] London data centre, dubbed Technology Centre 2 or TC2. From TC2, SunGard can host and manage customer’s IT solutions on a 24/7 basis, with expert staff continuously on-site to provide intervention and implementation support. SunGard is offering customers a combination of rack space hosting, Platform & Device Monitoring, Security & Network Management and Operating System & Data Base Management.
Keith Tilley, managing director UK and senior vice president Europe, said: “The opening of TC2 – with its hi-spec infrastructure, connectivity to our existing London Technology Centre and 24/7 support from highly-skilled IT professionals – brings dual site resilience within the reach of SunGard customers wishing to ensure the availability of key production systems. Such service levels used to be the almost exclusive preserve of major financial institutions, but as most of today’s organisations have at least one IT application that requires 24/7 uptime, this level of availability is now commonplace across all sectors. Our dual site solution will enable customers to stay in business at a fraction of the cost of buying, or building, their own dedicated solution.
“The ability to retrieve data and keep functioning in an interruption can save a business from financial ruin. Recent research from The Chartered Management Institute, confirms IT failure remains the top cause of disruption to business continuity in the UK, yet only 51% of businesses have a strategy in place to ensure their systems are constantly available2. The customers in our new data centre can be assured their IT systems are available and protected on a daily basis.”
Using its new TC2 environment, SunGard is able to ensure that customer’s services are continuously available – however large the traffic peaks they experience. This is achieved by “load balancing” traffic between TC2 and SunGard’s original resilient1 data centre: The London Technology Centre (LTC). Keith Tilley added: “At a time when consumer choice and promiscuity is expanding rapidly, businesses must ensure their services are constantly available. By outsourcing the equipment, infrastructure and connectivity to SunGard, we can allow our customers to focus on managing their business applications themselves.”
Load balancing between the new and existing Technology Centres is possible due to ScaleNet (SunGard’s high-bandwidth optical metropolitan area network), which connects the two data centres through dedicated fibre routes. The distance between LTC and TC2 enables synchronous storage replication solutions to be deployed, whilst maintaining the sufficient distance required for diversity and industry best practice. SunGard is currently the only Information Availability provider in the UK to provide geographically separate dual resilient1 tier IV data centre capabilities. This mirrored solution also gives SunGard resilient connectivity, power and cooling to deliver the optimum operating environment for its customers’ IT equipment.
SunGard’s TC2 hosted Managed IT Solutions also offer customers the ability to asynchronously replicate disk space for their own clients. SunGard’s resilient and scaleable infrastructure is especially attractive to companies, which offer their own customers application-based services.
SunGard has invested several million pounds in TC2, which occupies over 10,000 square feet in London’s Docklands, with further expansion potential. It further strengthens SunGard’s 20-strong portfolio of hosting and recovery centres in the UK, bringing the total square footage of Information Availability facilities to over 900,000 square feet.
[1] 1 Tier IV = A ‘fault tolerant’ data centre offering 99.995% infrastructure availability; the highest availability classification according to The Uptime Institute white paper entitled: “Industry standard tier classifications define site infrastructure performance”. www.upsite.com.
2 Chartered Management Institute, Business Management 2005
About SunGard Availability Services
SunGard Availability Services is the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability services, helping to ensure that more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe have access to their business-critical information systems. With over 3.5 million square feet. of hardened facilities, SunGard offers a complete range of information availability services for more than 30 technology platforms, from 48 hour disaster recovery hot sites to always-on, high-availability infrastructure, co-location and electronic vaulting services. SunGard also provides technology and systems management services for application and data centre outsourcing, as well as business continuity consulting services and planning software. www.sungard.co.uk.