SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of information availability services, today announced that development of another fully-resilient data centre is under way in London's Docklands.
The tier IV data centre will support SunGard's expanding portfolio of managed IT and high availability solutions. Global Switch, a leading European provider of state-of-the-art data centres, has been chosen by SunGard to provide the real estate, owing to the quality of its infrastructure and the scalability and flexibility of its business model.
SunGard is committing several million pounds in the new data centre, dubbed Technology Centre 2 (TC2), which occupies over 10 000 square feet.
This will bring the total square footage of SunGard's UK information availability facilities to over 900 000 square feet, comprised of both data centre and workplace.
The commitment reflects customers' demands for managed IT services in the capital, particularly in the financial services sector. High-end information availability solutions are on the priority list as a result of drivers such as compliance and increased competition.
Keith Tilley, managing director UK and senior vice-president Europe, said: "As more and more businesses find that outsourcing their information availability is more cost-effective and productive than other approaches, SunGard is continuing to invest ahead of customer demand and industry changes to offer greater numbers of customers the right mix of services for them. This new facility demonstrates SunGard's commitment to helping businesses craft a holistic approach to information availability, whereby they can be always prepared, always ready and 'always on', whatever risks or interruptions they or their mission-critical systems may face."
With deployment in technology for business advantage varying across organisations according to budget, sector and size; one size does not fit all when it comes to defining the strategies that keep key business systems and processes available or companies competitive. To this end, TC2 - which will deliver enhanced managed IT and high availability solutions, with expert staff continuously on-site to provide intervention and implementation support - further strengthens SunGard's 20-strong portfolio of hosting and recovery centres in the UK, all designed to specifications that meet the myriad needs of the industry.
SunGard will extend its comprehensive monitoring and management fabric to TC2, and will offer its full range of managed IT services from this new site.
SunGard is interconnecting these technology centres through ScaleNet (SunGard's high-bandwidth optical metropolitan area network), using diverse dedicated fibre routes, offering Fibre Channel and Ethernet services to customers up to 10Gbps. The distance between the two technology centres enables synchronous storage replication solutions to be deployed, while maintaining the maximum distance need for diversity and industry best practice. SunGard is therefore one of the first (and currently only) information availability company in the UK to provide geographically separate dual tier IV data centre capabilities, in keeping with the current industry shift towards this level of requirement.
TC2 will provide SunGard with diversity in relation to its other data centres, helping its customers to benefit from a dual tier IV site. This mirrored solution gives SunGard resilient connectivity, power and cooling to deliver the optimum operating environment for its customers' IT equipment.
Julian King, commercial director, Global Switch, commented: "We are delighted to be working with SunGard on this highly strategic centre to help them implement their strategy for information availability services. Global Switch's independence combined with the high quality and scalability of our sites made us an ideal partner for this venture."
* 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.
Tiers I - III are:
* Tier I = Basic data centre, offering 99.671% availability
* Tier II = Redundant components data centre, offering 99.741% availability
* Tier III = Concurrently maintainable data centre, offering 99.982% availability.
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