SunGard Availability Upgrades Enterprise-grade Cloud Service

SunGard Availability Service provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe. As the offspring of SunGard, they maintain five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, and help IT organizations across a wide spectrum of industries deal with their DR needs.

We're talking about a bedrock company here, so when it announces an expansion of its enterprise-grade cloud computing platform to deliver application availability "and ultimately recovery in the cloud," prospective cloud customers would be wise to take note.

According to Satish Hemachandran, director, product management, SunGard Availability Services, his cloud customers have a lot to gain from going with this enhanced enterprise-grade cloud offering, not the least being access to the VBlock Infrastructure Package, born of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition composed of Cisco, EMC and VMware.

"We have a very close partnership with these vendors," Hemachandran says.

According to the company's press release, the Vblock Infrastructure Package is a "preconfigured, pretested solution that combines best-in-class technology, including Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 100v and Multilayer Director Switches (MDS), EMC CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and VMware's vSphere platform. This technology choice...will provide customers with a path to pervasive virtualization and cloud IT infrastructure, while helping reduce total cost of ownership and meeting today's most demanding use cases."

That's a lot of powerful technology, and SunGard Availability Services has a lot of experience working on that level. As Hemachandran puts it, "We basically see enterprise cloud computing as a logical extension of what we've been doing.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 03/25/2010 at 12:48 PM