SunGard Availability Services Adds Multi-site High Availability to its Enterprise Cloud Services to Help Organizations Achieve Virtually Continuous Uptime

WAYNE, Pa., Aug. 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Organizations moving essential business applications to the cloud often face concerns they may need to sacrifice application availability to gain the cost and on-demand capacity advantages of cloud computing.  To help organizations address uptime requirements, SunGard Availability Services has become one of the first cloud services vendors to deliver high availability as part of its standard offering, helping customers to reduce cloud-based application downtime.  

With this new functionality – launching at VMworld, booth #1221 – SunGard standardizes availability beyond what is offered in the industry today. SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services utilize a fully redundant architecture comprised of two separate enterprise-grade cloud instances to provide geographic load-balancing and facilitate customer achievement of an active-active environment.  The design is an enhancement to SunGard's existing Enterprise Cloud Services and provides customers with two geographically diverse production sites integrated with recovery capabilities, allowing for seamless cloud services continuity.  

For cloud applications that do not require high availability architecture, SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services now also include a managed multi-site recovery option.  With this option, SunGard provides a secondary cloud site for recovery – operational within four hours – should the primary cloud site experience an outage. The four hour recovery time objective is backed by a contractual service level agreement.

"Application availability is critical for organizations no matter what platform they are using and companies should not have to trade availability in return for the financial and scalability gains of moving to cloud computing," said Rob Walters, vice president of product management, SunGard Availability Services. "The SunGard cloud is inherently redundant, but with these enhancements, SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services customers can now expect even greater availability assurances for applications hosted in the cloud."

This new release of SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services also includes additional managed services for the cloud.

Interconnect. SunGard has added the ability to interconnect customer applications running on SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services with physical environments hosted in SunGard data centers.  This capability allows customers to share data from legacy systems that still require dedicated hosting with cloud environments.  The connectivity can be done within the same site (such as from a cloud environment to a dedicated ERP system or Oracle database within the same data center facility) or managed between multiple sites.

"Organizations today operate in a hybrid world of cloud, colocation and managed services.  They don't want critical information trapped in silos.  SunGard's ability to interconnect these environments helps ensure data from legacy environments can easily be shared with cloud-based applications to maximize business value," said Mr. Walters.

SunGard has added Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Active Directory and Hosted Blackberry Services to its portfolio of integrated managed services for cloud environments.  These services provide customers with active management by SunGard hosting experts to help ensure production workloads are available and reduce their IT administration burdens.

SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services are built on best-in-class Vblock technology from VMware, Cisco and EMC (VCE).  SunGard provides multi-tenant enterprise cloud and dedicated private cloud services for production applications.  SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services are backed by contractual service level agreements that help ensure 99.95 percent cloud infrastructure availability.  Cloud customers can also contract for and benefit from access to SunGard's broad portfolio of additional managed hosting, storage and recovery services for heterogeneous, physical and virtual environments.

For more information about SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services visit www.sungardas.com/cloud.

About SunGard Availability Services

SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to over 9,000 customers globally.  With approximately five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, SunGard Availability Services helps customers improve the resilience of their mission critical systems by designing, implementing and managing cost-effective solutions using people, process and technology to address enterprise IT availability needs. Through direct sales and channel partners, we help organizations ensure their people and customers have uninterrupted access to the information systems they need in order to do business. To learn more, visit www.sungardas.com or call 1-800-468-7483.  Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

About SunGard

SunGard is one of the world's leading software and technology services companies.  SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves more than 25,000 customers in 70 countries.  SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector.  SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.  With annual revenue of about $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. Look for us wherever the mission is critical. For more information, visit www.sungard.com.  

Trademark Information: SunGard and SunGard logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

SOURCE SunGard Availability Services