The Cornwall, Ontario newspaper covered the news that SunGard Availability Services signed a deal to set up a 14,000-square-foot facility at the NAV Centre that can hold up to 350 workers for workforce continuity services for Canadian companies dealing with a disaster. The site also features an audio clip of SunGard’s Bruno Berti explaining to the reporter that SunGard chose Cornwall for its geographic proximity to Ottawa and Montreal, where SunGard has major clients in government and the financial industry.

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Dan Woods of Forbes.com interviews Indu Kodukula and writes a lengthy article on enterprise IT and shifting enterprise applications to the cloud. Indu is the focus of the article as he explains five major facets of enterprise cloud readiness. Indu concludes that as enterprises move some applications to the cloud, they must fundamentally rethink their IT budgets.

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TMC announced the winners of the 2011 Cloud Computing Excellence Awards, sponsored by Cloud Computing Magazine. The awards honor companies that most effectively leveraged cloud computing to bring new, differentiated offerings to the marketplace. SunGard Availability Services was selected as a winner for its Enterprise Cloud Services offering.

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Peter Key of the Philadelphia Business Journal profiles the growing influence of cloud computing, and references SunGard Availability Services as an example of a provider in the Philadelphia-area. The article quotes SunGard’s Matthew Carey describing the differences between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. The article goes on to recount SunGard’s history as a cloud services provider, and describes in detail the relationship between SunGard and Energy Plus, a new customer. Hugh Scott, CIO of Energy Plus, is also quoted.

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A number of products to reach key personnel, employees, customers, and other stakeholders during an emergency are available, but how to choose the right emergency notification system for your organization involves careful thought and planning. In order to guide organizations through the process of selecting an emergency or mass notification system, SunGard Availability Services’ Tracey Forbes has developed seven key criteria to assess when evaluating one of these systems. Goals for the organization should be to select a system that is reliable, high performing, and interactive.

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After a record-setting $12 billion in damages due to weather disasters in 2011, more organizations are thinking seriously about implementing an emergency notification system to reach their personnel during a crisis. But with the marketplace flooded with products offering this service, choosing the right system is difficult. SunGard Availability Services offers seven key points to address when evaluating an emergency or mass notification system to ensure it is tailored to the organization’s specific requirements.

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Colocation provides companies with a practical alternative to the hassles of managing computer resources internally. It allows organizations to retain ownership and management of dedicated computer equipment while leveraging the space, power and cost advantages of housing that equipment in a secure, multi-tenant data center.

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In 2012, we will launch the era of the hybrid solution for enterprises. Cloud users are just now beginning to realize that it makes no sense to move into the cloud lock, stock and barrel. Instead, enterprises in particular will begin to identify and move workloads that fit well in the cloud space, but shored up on the back end.

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Enterprises will continue to face global economic pressures in 2012, and as a result, IT departments will have to grapple with budgets reduced even further. Perhaps more than any time in the past three years, there will be a strong push in 2012 to transition costly data center operations into fluid and efficient processes that deliver savings.

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Zenoss Inc., provider of cloud management software, announced Tuesday that SunGard Availability Services has deployed Zenoss Service Dynamics as its common service assurance platform for global cloud and managed services infrastructure.

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Zenoss Inc., a leading provider of cloud management software, announced today that SunGard Availability Services has deployed Zenoss Service Dynamics as its common service assurance platform for global cloud and managed services infrastructure.

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SunGard Availability Services, the disaster recovery service provider, has embraced the Zenoss Service Dynamics platform to support the company’s cloud services and managed services infrastructure. Here’s a closer look at SunGard’s move.

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SunGard Availability Services is offering an initiative for UK CIOs to test the benefits of its cloud computing environment.

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Once upon a time, before the Internet, laptop and tablet computers, and smart phones, there was a simple way for information-technology departments to keep their organizations’ data secure: limit the number of places their computer systems could be accessed and the number of people who could access them.

Those days are gone.

“From a threat perspective, it just keeps growing,” said Christopher Burgher, a principal in the Availability Services Consulting unit of Wayne-based SunGard Data Systems Inc.’s Availability Services business.

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In “Five Reasons Why Disaster Recovery Plans Fail,” SunGard presents a simple yet thoughtful prescription on how disregard toward a strategy can derail the best DR planning efforts. The potential loss of revenue and trust that can occur due to disruption is cause for concern but to have a plan and not treat it as a living and integral part of the IT strategy is foolish.

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SunGard selected by Energy Plus. Energy company Energy Plus Holdings LLC announced that it is adopting a hybrid cloud model for running production applications that utilizes both SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services and existing managed services the company employs from SunGard.

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As cloud services mature, they are likely to come closer to services being offered in the enterprise data center. SunGard, for example, is now offering enterprise-class application services, including highly available SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

Since mid-November, SunGard's Availability Services unit has been offering cloud-based SAP ERP services that "meet the availability, security, operations, and capacity needs" of enterprise customers, said Indu Kodukula, executive VP and CTO, in an interview. That means all SAP applications running as a service in a SunGard data center have a guaranteed 99.95% virtual machine uptime and 99.9% production application uptime, spelled out in a service-level agreement. A 99.9% guarantee still allows 8.75 hours of downtime a year.

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One of the big issues with cloud computing is the simple fact that IT organizations want to have their cake and eat it too. They generally like the cost model associated with cloud computing, but are not all that excited about sharing infrastructure. In other words, many of them are really looking for a hybrid approach that combines the best of cloud computing with traditional managed hosting models.

SunGard Availability Services, a provider of IT services, is attempting to deliver just that with a new SunGard SAP Services offering that is based on the vBlock integrated server platform developed by The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company, a joint venture between Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intel.

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Last month, we looked at "8 Deduplication Products You Must Check Out," which highlighted deduplication products from Quantum, HP, EMC (Avamar and Data Domain), Asigra, Symantec, Atempo and Commvault. But that only scratched the surface on what is a thriving areas of storage innovation.

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AUSTIN, Texas — As part of its research efforts to help create safer and faster computing, the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin has partnered with SunGard Availability Services to improve emerging cloud-based technologies through a new center for cloud computing research.

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SunGard Availability Services rolled out its Managed Recovery Plan designed to help large enterprises focus on primary production operations as opposed to optimizing application recovery. This Recovery-as-a-Service offering, which serves both physical and virtual environments, can be hosted from various locations and relies on a relationship between a remote SunGard recovery expert and the customer's IT operations.

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SunGard Availability Services has announced a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin to create a Cloud Computing Research Center. Through the partnership, SunGard and UT Austin will jointly identify relevant and unsolved research problems in the cloud-computing field, pursue targeted research initiatives to solve those problems and commercialize as appropriate the resulting research. It is anticipated that the results of the research will have an impact in such areas as mobile computing, networking, verification and fraud protection, encryption, and large-scale distributed processing. SunGard will contribute its expertise—as a leading service provider of cloud computing, managed hosting, and application recovery to the Center—which is located on the University’s Austin campus.

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SunGard Availability Services has created the SunGard Managed Recovery Program to help secure the availability of both cloud and on-premise applications. The goal of the Managed Recovery Program is to manage the entire application recovery lifecycle for SunGard customers.

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SunGard Availability Services is teaming with the University of Texas at Austin to create a cloud computing research center. The new center is in a UT computer science building but officials said it will be part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex that is under construction in late 2012.

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The University of Texas and a Pennsylvania technology company have agreed to be partners on a cloud computing research center on UT's campus.

SunGard Availability Services, based in Wayne, Pa., plans to make a "high six-figure" investment in the center, said Indu Kodukula, executive vice president and chief technology officer at the company.

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SunGard Availability Services is working with the University of Texas at Austin to create a Cloud Computing Research Center. The unit of SunGard Data Systems Inc. said in a press release that it and the university will work together to identify unsolved problems related to cloud computing, launch targeted research initiatives to solve them, and commercialize the results of the initiatives when appropriate.

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SunGard Availability Services announced its Managed Recovery Program this week, which the company said cuts the cost and complexity of an organization’s DR operation by handing over planning and management tasks to SunGard’s staff. The company said in a statement on its website that the program takes over the planning, implementation, maintenance and testing of DR operations for a client. It also offers recovery at “contractually guaranteed service levels,” according to SunGard.

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Web hosting provider SunGard Availability Services announced on Wednesday it has launched its Managed Recover Program, a new offering that simplifies the application recovery for complex IT environments.

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SunGard has long been one of the leaders in business solutions across the globe. Today the company announced a new and improved Managed Recovery Program. For those not particularly familiar with this highly specialized field, SunGard's new program is geared towards helping take the difficulty out of application recovery in highly complex IT situations.

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Application availability is a key priority for IT organizations supporting mission-critical business processes. But many companies grapple with identifying the most effective, secure and efficient solution that fits the complexity of their IT environments. To help organizations meet this challenge, SunGard Availability Services is augmenting its portfolio of offerings with Recover2Cloud, a suite of managed recovery services backed by guaranteed service levels.

SunGard Availability Services has announced that it has been certified as a Cisco Master Managed Services Channel Partner (MSCP). This official designation identifies SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services as meeting the highest level of achievement for partners delivering Cisco technologies as a managed solution. SunGard was also certified as a Cisco Cloud Provider to offer Cisco Powered IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) Cloud, which recognizes SunGard’s delivery of exceptional cloud services in a multitenant environment to end customers.

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The company has been certified as a Cisco Master Managed Services Channel Partner (MSCP) and also received the official designation of a Cisco Cloud Provider to offer Cisco Powered IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) Cloud. Cisco now recognizes SunGard, a software and technology services company, as a provider that can deliver exceptional cloud services in a multitenant environment to end customers.

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Alert Logic President and CEO Gray Hall attributes the company’s growth to two main factors.

1. Demand for security and compliance solutions from the company’s cloud and hosting service provider channel programs
2. A hot start for new partners, mainly SunGard Availability Services

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“We were under pretty tight time constraints for the Powells.com migration, so we needed a vendor that could not only provide enterprise-grade hosting, but could also project manage the migration,” said Brian Fitzgerald, general manager, Powells.com. “The SunGard staff orchestrated a seamless move of Powells.com over a single weekend. As a result, our staff was able to stay focused on business initiatives and our customers experienced no lapse in service.”

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Philadelphia has long been a major base of operations for SunGard Availability Services. The company continues to expand its data center operations in the city, and last week showed off its newest facility at 1500 Spring Garden Street, complete with rooftop cooling units to use outside air to cool customer servers during the winter.

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Dr. Mickey Zandi, managing director at SunGard Availability Services, notes the importance of the latter in determining your required level of data center availability: “Companies should look at the criticality of their applications, systems and services that are essential to running the business. This is determined by a required or mandated recovery that is driven by the resiliency of the mission-critical applications.”

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SunGard expanded the data center to accommodate demand for its cloud-computing, co-location and managed-IT services. The data center hosts its Enterprise Cloud Services, which it launched in 2010, and Recover2Cloud, a suite of managed recovery services backed by guaranteed service levels it launched at the end of August.

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Sramana Mitra: Is that an opportunity that is similar to what Salesforce.com has done in customer relationship management, or are you saying more domain-specific applications inside enterprises or vertical applications and so forth?

Indu Kodukula: No, I think it’s across the board, even for horizontal applications.

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SunGard Availability Services, the disaster recovery and managed IT services specialist, has expanded a Philadelphia, Pa., data center to meet growing demand for cloud services. At times we wonder if the world has too many data centers and too few cloud customers amid all the cloud hype. But SunGard’s data center investment appears to eliminate our concerns.

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Indu Kodukula: Absolutely. First of all, you can come and deploy your services on us. If you don’t, we offer you essentially a way to not have to continue to use it if don’t want to. The cost is always a consideration. More important, we are building up a team of solution architects who are going to be able to sit down – we see that as an investment – the solution architects would actually sit down with entrepreneurs and walk them through, or sit down with them and, in many cases, help them design their applications so that they run the right way on the cloud, absolutely.

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SunGard Availability, the corporate computer backup service run by Wayne-based SunGard Data, has invested $14 million in a 12,200 sq ft expansion of its secure data center in the 1500 block of Spring Garden St.

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Power, however, is increasingly taking center stage. Dr. Mickey Zandi, managing director at SunGard Availability Services, notes that data centers “are faced with the ever-growing demand for more services from the servers and applications, which are power hungry and require more horse power. Today, more and more applications are being deployed in a production environment where power and cooling are required for keeping chips, hardware and software more resilient.”

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SM: Maybe the one data point that would clarify the segmentation is what is the revenue level range of the 10,000 clients that SunGard services?

IK: It is starting at about $2 billion and going down to several hundred million.

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Sramana Mitra: What you are saying is the applications are going to go on to third-party cloud-based application vendors. The infrastructure is going to go to the data center companies and the public cloud vendors who deliver infrastructure as a service.

Indu Kodukula: And in many cases, the application vendors will actually run on that infrastructure, right?

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Indu Kodukula: I think if you look at the cloud broadly today, you absolutely have a version of SharePoint that runs on hyper-v, which is a Microsoft hypervisor, or you can run it on VMware. I think the software availability that is virtualized is there. I don’t think that is necessarily the concern. I think the concern becomes how do you take that workload – let’s say you take SharePoint and you run that on VMware – how do you find a service provider who is going to be able to do that for you? How are you going to be able to do that and remain comfortable, as enterprise IT, that you’re not going to sacrifice on availability or security? I think there is, from a public cloud perspective, there is Amazon, and there is everybody else.

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“Colocation is all about economies of scale, focusing on your core competencies as a business and letting someone else handle the data center aspect,” says Joe Sullivan, senior director, colocation product management with www.sungardas.com">SunGard Availability Services. “From a financial perspective, it allows you to take a large cash outlay or capital expense and convert that into an operating expense.”

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Indu Kodukula: That is a great question. If I can start with a little bit of context, many of our clients have just the same challenge that we face. We have about $1.5 billion in revenue. We have an IT staff that is under a tremendous amount of pressure to become more efficient and to do more with less. We have many of the same issues around consolidation, around new service roll-outs, new revenue generation opportunities, all of those that our clients have. A lot of the problems that we solve internally are of relevance to our clients and our customers.

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Indu Kodukula: We have historically been an infrastructure-heavy business, and our business model has been very simple. On the recovery side, our business model has been a shared inventory that matches the customer infrastructure. In the event of any sort of service interruption, we are in a position to recover, or we are in a position to help our clients recover their applications on the same inventory or the same infrastructure on which they run their applications.

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Credit unions should develop a practical and holistic approach to system and data availability, and leverage business resiliencies where possible.

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Indu Kodukula: One of the nice things about being in technology for a very long time is that you see patterns start to repeat. When I was a grad student, sort of a joke was anything in computer science can either be solved by inserting the layer of interaction or by reading the history books. One way to think about cloud computing is that it’s making the best use of shared structure and putting the utility model around so that for the first time in a very long time, enterprise IT can start to build systems and services and pay for the underlying resources on a usage basis, rather than spend a bunch of capex (capital expenditures) upfront.

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Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have a lot of customer and employee data to maintain and sustain. Because they lack servers large enough to support rapid growth and expansion, they enlist the aid of companies like SunGard Availability Services. With offices in the United States, Ireland, Luxembourg, France, Belgium, and Sweden, SunGard helps SMEs to protect themselves against not only expected issues such as power outages, but also against the unexpected like hurricanes or earthquakes.

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Application availability is a key priority for IT organizations supporting mission-critical business processes. But many companies grapple with identifying the most effective, secure and efficient solution that fits the complexity of their IT environments. To help organizations meet this challenge, SunGard is augmenting its portfolio of offerings with Recover2Cloud, a suite of managed recovery services backed by guaranteed service levels.

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To help small and midsize businesses (SMBs) meet this challenge, SunGard Availability Services is augmenting its portfolio of offerings with Recover2Cloud,a suite of managed recovery services backed by guaranteed service levels.

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i365 Inc., a Seagate company, announced that SunGard Availability Services, will utilize the EVault Remote Disaster Recovery (RDR) Recovery as a Service platform to bring its Recover2Cloud for Vaulting service to market.

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Emergency notification service companies such as Everbridge, SunGard, Omnilert, and Federal Signal have seen a tremendous uptick in automated call tree services.

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Seeking to leverage its reputation for business continuity, SunGard Availability unveiled two new services last week at VMworld – a multi-location “hot site” for cloud applications, and a managed cloud backup service that make to easier to recover VM-based applications running in data centers.

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The Seagate Company i365 Inc. announced this month that SunGard Availability Services will employ the EVault Remote Disaster Recovery (RDR) recovery as a service platform to bring its Recover2Cloud for Vaulting service to market.

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Application availability is a key priority for IT organizations supporting mission-critical business processes. But many companies grapple with identifying the most effective, secure and efficient solution that fits the complexity of their IT environments. To help organizations meet this challenge, SunGard Availability Services is augmenting its portfolio of offerings with Recover2Cloud, a suite of managed recovery services backed by guaranteed service levels.

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SunGard last week unveiled a new managed cloud-based DR service called Recover2Cloud that supports IBM i and other platforms. The new offering provides SunGard customers an Internet-based connection to the company's data center resources, as well as access to SunGard experts.

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SunGard has taken the wraps off its new managed cloud based disaster recovery service. The Recover2Cloud is capable of supporting IBM i and other platforms as well.

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Janel Ryan, senior product marketing manager at SunGard Availability Services, summarizes the case for colocation as follows: “Typically, businesses that choose colocation are seeking an alternative to building or leasing data center space, business continuity or disaster recovery, temporary data center capacity, or support for an Internet-facing application and content.”

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"These announcements are really two sides of the same coin," said Indu Kodukula, EVP Products and CTO at SunGard Availability Services. "Regardless of whether you run production yourself or on our cloud, you use the same technology to make a high availability (HA) option possible, and the lack of HA has been a significant barrier to the cloud in general. Once you virtualize production, it doesn’t matter if you run it or we run it for you -- it's the same."

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Recover2Cloud is designed to provide an automated way for enterprises to create low-cost backup systems as virtual machines stored in external data centers. Data flowing through an application on premises is replicated to a SunGard recovery system.

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Disaster recovery specialty firm SunGard announced this week Recover2Cloud, a collection of managed recovery services that provide guarantees to recover your servers including replications and data vaults. The idea is to be completely up and running within a day after disaster strikes. SunGard operates dozens of offsite data centers around the world and is used by thousands of large corporations for disaster recovery; this is their first general-purpose virtual offering that will work across a broad set of enterprise applications.

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IT software and services company SunGard on Monday announced that it has added multi-site support for its enterprise-grade cloud services to allow for fully redundant architecture for higher availability or in the event of a failure.

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Application availability is a top priority for IT organizations supporting mission-critical business processes, but many companies grapple with identifying an effective, secure and efficient solution to fit the complexity of their IT environments. To help small and midsize businesses (SMBs) meet this challenge, SunGard Availability Services is augmenting its portfolio of offerings with Recover2Cloud, a suite of managed recovery services backed by guaranteed service levels.

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SunGard's availability services arm has added a high-availability option to its standard service portfolio for enterprise cloud customers looking to deploy mission-critical applications in the Cloud.

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Currently Recover2Cloud offers two services, Recover2Cloud for Server Replication, which is designed for physical server- and cloud-based mission-critical applications that need to be recovered within four hours, and Recover2Cloud for Vaulting. The latter is a cloud storage platform that restores data stored in SunGard’s datacenters.

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Web hosting provider SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com) announced on Monday it is now offering multi-site high availability as part of its standard offering, helping customers to reduce cloud-based application downtime.

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Spokespeople for Equinix, Telx, Rackspace, SunGard, NTT America and Savvis told DatacenterDynamics that none of their data centers on the East Coast had lost utility power as a result of the storm and continued operating normally.

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SunGard, a major provider of disaster recovery and business continuity services, said 12 of its availability services facilities in the Northeast were in the earthquake zone. "At this time, all systems are working normally, and we have no reports or indications of any power outages in any of our data centers or workforce recovery centers. SunGard Availability Services remains on high alert," said SunGard Availability Services spokesperson Marifran Manzo-Ritchie.

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SunGard Availability Service, which focuses on disaster recovery services, also reported no impact to its operations.

“Twelve of SunGard Availability Services’ facilities in the Northeast were in the zone of today’s moderate earthquake that was centered in Virginia,” said SunGard Availability Services spokesperson Marifran Manzo-Ritchie. At this time, all systems are working normally and we have no reports or indications of any power outages in any of our data centers or workforce recovery centers. SunGard Availability Services remains on high alert. We are in contact with our customers and we continue to monitor facilities for any incidental damage or related issues.”

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ChuanhowTech has become an authorized representative for SunGard Availability Services in Taiwan and Hong Kong. An information and communications technology provider and systems integrator, ChuanhowTech will sell and support SunGard’s business continuity software offering: Continuity Management Solution. ChuanhowTech will also support customers that already use SunGard’s Continuity Management Solution in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

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Naturally, attempts are underway to improve PUE as well. For instance, Robert Salvatore, director of Infrastructure Compliance and Green Initiatives at SunGard Availability Services, notes that “while PUE and DCiE continue to be the industry standard to measure energy efficiency, more-granular definitions of metrics like PUE are being proposed by non-profit groups such as The Green Grid.” Salvatore goes on to say, “A more detailed definition of PUE is on the horizon. The industry is currently starting to qualify different levels of PUE, which is described as either level 1 (basic), level 2 (intermediate), or level 3 (advanced). Each level is based on how the data was collected, the type of equipment that collected the data, the timeframe covered by the reported value and the frequency in which results were tracked.”

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“Energy efficiency and other cost-saving measures are still a priority for data center managers. In this economy, data center managers are looking to save on their bottom line and becoming more energy efficient can help with this,” says Robert Salvatore, director of Infrastructure Compliance and Green Initiatives at SunGard Availability Services.

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SunGard, a large managed services provider, sees a new opportunity in the security market. Indeed, SunGard Availability Services plans to leverage Alert Logic‘s SaaS tools for various vulnerability assessment, intrusion detection and log management services.

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Managed security services are generating considerable noise today on MSPmentor. In related news, we’ve noted that SunGard Managed Security Services now leverage Alert Logic’s intrusion detection SaaS service; and Qualys has overhauled its user interface while also promoting vulnerability assessment services to MSPs.

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Amazon and other data center operators take precautions to protect against lightning strikes, said Indu Kodukula, CTO of SunGard Availability Services, a disaster recovery specialist firm. But a direct strike on the power supplier's transformer "is a thing you pray never happens to you," he noted.

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Maliyil speaks from experience. Last year, the 10-year-old company needed to refresh its hardware, but Maliyal didn't want to spend the money. Instead, the company moved its entire operation from its colocation provider to two geographically disparate public clouds from SunGard and Opsource, saving an estimated $85,000 a month, while continuing to grow the business.

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Web hosting provider SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com) announced on Thursday that it will integrate security solutions from Alert Logic (www.alertlogic.com) into its suite of managed security services.

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“Business continuity plans help make sure that downtime procedures, recovery time objectives, and recovery point objectives all support the risks deemed acceptable by the organization.”

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According to the April 2011 SunGard Availability Services Business Continuity Software International User Group Forum Survey conducted by SunGard Availability Services, 74 percent of respondents selected ‘protection of reputation and brand’ as one of the main reasons for having a business continuity plan. Protection of brand out-paced other top reasons for business continuity planning including ‘minimizing economic impact to an organization’ and ‘complying with regulations, laws and standards.’

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The one thing that IBM did not do here, you will note, is offer a recovery service for OS/400 and IBM i workloads. This is good news for the several companies that have started their own backup and disaster recovery clouds, usually in partnership with one of the HA software suppliers in the midrange. This includes Vault400, SafeData, Concentric, SunGard, Consonus Technologies, i365 (formerly Evault), Storagepipe Solutions, Venyu, Server Backup, and Synergistic Online, just to name a few.

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SunGard Availability Services advises organizations to manage a hurricane as a planned event. Organizations will benefit every day, by revealing critical gaps in the availability of production environments. Disaster recovery plans, claim the company, should include a process to guide operations in moving back to production systems from recovery sites following failures and disaster threats, such as after a hurricane passes.

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SunGard, the Wayne-based data-disaster recovery company, said its SunGard Availability Services unit was expanding in India with two new workplace recovery facilities. The company said the move followed the signing of a contract with a major international bank, which it did not name. The new centers are in Thane, near Mumbai, and Noida, near New Delhi. The company would not say how many jobs would be added.

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Web hosting provider SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com) announced on Tuesday that it has expanded its footprint in India with two new workplace recovery centers. The company has also named Balachander Vasireddi as general manager for India.

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At the moment, there seems to be a lot of interest in building private clouds behind firewalls in the name of security. While that approach no doubt saves money by increasing server utilization, it still puts the burden for building the IT infrastructure on the customer’s capital budget. Given the simple fact that most companies are looking for ways to treat IT expenditures as an operating expense that can be easily scaled up or down, Janel Ryan, senior product marketing manager for SunGard Availability Services, a provider of cloud computing services, argues private clouds deployed on premise don’t address one of the primary reasons that businesses became so interested in cloud computing.

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SunGard Availability Services has been selected to host electronic signature technology company DocuSign’s It environment. DocuSign says it is planning to grow in coming years and needed a solution that could allow it to expand its global network without the expense of building its own data centers.

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InMage announced Tuesday that SunGard Availability Services has chosen its ScoutCloud platform to help bring the next generation of SunGard’s Server Replication services to market. SunGard’s Server Replication services replicate customer data from virtual or physical systems to secure SunGard data centers.

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A provider of electronic signature technology DocuSign has selected hosting and managed network services from SunGard to further enhance the security and reliability of its global network.

Using one of SunGard’s data center facilities, DocuSign expects to accommodate the company’s rapid growth.

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DocuSign, a major player in electronic signature technology, has selected hosting and managed network services from SunGard to enhance the security and reliability of the company's global network.

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SunGard Availability Services announced today that DocuSign, the global leader in electronic signature technology, has selected hosting and managed network services from SunGard to further enhance the security and reliability of the company's global network. DocuSign will utilize one of SunGard's data center facilities to accommodate the company's rapid growth.

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"Some IT vendors, welcome increasing data volumes. But despite what storage vendors may have you believe, you can't just keep throwing servers at your exponentially expanding data assets. Not all data is born equal and the importance of different types of data is far from constant; whereas today's data might need to be replicated and recoverable in seconds, the chances are that last week's data is less critical and can be stored on a cheaper medium," said Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Service

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“Today, most companies are shifting from a capital expenditure to operational expenditure model in addressing IT infrastructure,” says Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com). “So unless there is a unique set of requirements specific to an organization’s business or industry, it is difficult to justify building a new data center at this time.”

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Elle J. Byram, corporate counsel for ZL Technologies, questions whether Wal-Mart class-action would increase the number of individual suits. Many people “in some suits won’t sue on their own and may be totally unaware that they even have an actionable legal claim,” she noted.

ZL Technologies recently partnered with managed hosting provider SunGard Availability Services to offer e-discovery and other applications on a software-as-a-service basis.

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A recovered system could get swift access to stateful data if there were a continuous mirror image fed into a remote data center that also holds the backup virtual machines, says Indu Kodukula, CTO and executive VP of products at SunGard. Replicated data is also needed for so-called cloud bursting--when infrastructure as a service takes over for in-house servers that run out of capacity. Those online servers will need stateful data to spring into action. Kodukula says customers of such a service might even pay based on the speed of recovery.

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ZL Technologies, a provider of archiving, records management, and e-discovery software for large enterprises, has expanded its Unified Archive as a software-as-a-service solution (SaaS) through a partnership with SunGard Availability Services.

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ZL Technologies leverages SunGard Availability Services. ZL Technologies announced they are leveraging Enterprise Cloud Services from SunGard Availability Services to deliver a new Software-as-a-Service offering. The ZL Unified Archive production applications will be supported on Sungard’s fully Managed Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering and provide multiple layers of protection and network services.

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Interest in e-discovery as a managed or hosted service shows no signs of abating. In the latest data point, ZL Technologies, which offers e-discovery, has tapped SunGard Availability Services for hosting and managed services. SunGard now supports ZL’s Unified Archive production applications, which include e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and data archiving. SunGard offers its virtual private data centers along with such managed services as monitoring, patching, backup, maintenance, and trouble resolution, according to the company.

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Dr. Mickey Zandi, managing director at SunGard Availability Services, states, “A company should have a clear picture of the end state of its data center project before beginning the search for a consultant. The company should perform detailed inventory and asset tracking, as well as develop an interdependency matrix. This will help companies identify all their applications and the interrelations of the applications.”

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Web hosting provider SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com) announced on Tuesday it will hold an open house at its 12,500 square foot data center in Nashville.

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ZL Technologies is leveraging Enterprise Cloud Services from SunGard Availability Services to deliver a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services is helping ZL to broaden its customer reach without the need to build and staff new, costly IT infrastructure.

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What about other service providers—can a company outsource DR entirely rather than just storing data in the cloud? If you look at companies like SunGard and IBM, these companies have had some very successful services providing DR. They are basically providing an alternative recovery site; your data is being replicated; they have standby equipment that is ready to be deployed, sometimes even hot equipment for where replication is taking place.

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The data center host-cum-cloud IaaS provider model has worked perfectly for SaaS provider Cycle30, Jim Dunlap says, company president.
When the Cycle 30 team received the go-ahead to create a subsidiary, it decided not to spend "precious capital" on building its own data centers but rather to partner with a traditional hosting company, SunGard. "And that gave us the opportunity to look at our business model and determine whether or not we could use cloud computing as a way to decrease our cost of going to market," he says.

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When it comes to business continuity preparedness, organizations should recall major events like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Northeast power blackout of 2003, or the San Francisco area earthquake in 1989, and ensure they are planning for an incident where the scope, duration, and impact may have been previously unimaginable.

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An excellent starting point for an organization looking at cloud computing platforms is to examine their IT architectures. Only by aligning the architecture - compute, network, data center, power and storage resources - with applications can a company be on the path to achieve the reliability and performance it requires within a cloud environment.

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As companies evaluate cloud computing as part of an overall business delivery model, deciding which applications are candidates to move to cloud and which need to remain in legacy environments is part of the planning process. Identifying business requirements up front creates the right basis for planning cloud projects, timelines, and resources.

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A business continuity plan is not a nice-to-have; it's a must have. Given the growing possibility of major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5), is your business as prepared as it needs to be for a major catastrophe? To help you stay in operation in the face of the increasing threat presented by hurricane seasons, SunGard has developed a free Hurricane Planning Toolkit - available now, for a limited time!

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When faced with potential natural disasters such as hurricanes, it's essential that small businesses prepare their employees to respond, William Hughes, director of consulting services at SunGard Availability Services, a company that specializes in business continuity and disaster recovery, told BusinessNewsDaily.

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The cloud is not one thing, so when you're thinking about moving to the cloud, try to find the one that most closely matches the IT environment you've built for yourself. And beware of cloud SLAs, advised Carl Meadows, director of managed services product management at SunGard.

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Chris McNally, a storage architect at IT hosting company Sungard, was among those involved in the discussion. At his company, he said, to better learn how systems fit together, AIX and backup administrators are undergoing cross-training in storage area networks (SANs) and cloud storage.

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In a similar fashion, IT workers at Sungard, an IT hosting firm, are being trained in the way various components fit into the overall IT operation. Backup administrators, for example, are learning about storage area networks and cloud storage, said Chris McNally, a storage architect Sungard.

"So instead of me being the storage guy who has to argue with these other guys about how this works and what we do, they're now able make intelligent requests with regard to storage," McNally said.

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There are numerous software products that can assist with the preparation of a BIA, including the SunGard Continuity Management Solution BIA Professional, and eBRP Solutions' BIA Utility, to name only a few.

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Chris McNally, a storage architect at IT hosting company Sungard, said he is helping to cross-train employees to learn how various systems fit into a larger IT ecosystem. For example, McNally said, AIX and backup administrators have volunteered to undergo storage area network (SAN) and cloud storage training at Sungard.

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SunGard Availability Services announced enhancements to PLANet, a web-based business continuity planning tool for community banks that helps ensure business continuity plans are constructed according to financial industry regulations and best practices.

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SunGard, one of the world's leading software and technology services companies, has given some recommendations to organizations gearing up for cloud computing.

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"In cloud computing, true protection is an outcome of the right architecture for the right application," said Janel Ryan, senior product marketing manager at SunGard Availability Services. "Organizations need to fully understand their individual application requirements and, if using a cloud platform, the corresponding cloud architecture. With that knowledge, they can make informed decisions about what cloud platform best meets the reliability and performance requirements of their specific applications."

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An excellent starting point for an organization looking at cloud computing platforms is to examine its IT architecture. Only by aligning the architecture – compute, network, data center, power and storage resources – with applications can a company be on the path to achieve the reliability and performance it requires within a cloud environment.

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Community Banks should therefore develop a practical and holistic approach to system and data availability and leverage business resilience where possible. The following tips will help business and IT personnel as they look at ways to improve information availability.

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SunGard Availability Services said it has improved its PLANet service, enhancing the ability of the Web-based continuity planning tool to help credit unions and community banks stay in compliance and lower risk.

SunGard Availability Services announced new appointments to its executive leadership team to fully support, develop and grow its services.

Andrew A. Stern, CEO of the company said in a statement, “Talent investment is a huge focus as we continue to grow our services and define new offerings in the marketplace. This includes leveraging and developing our team of outstanding staff while attracting energetic and talented individuals to SunGard.”

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According to Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, SunGard Availability Services, modular data centers can also make life easier for data center architects and managers. They reduce the need to manage and architect the difficult interfaces of a data center because these things are already done by the pod vendor.

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Obviously, Cloud Computing is a hot space right now. Just being recognized as a player in the Cloud can instantly boost your market value, and major vendors are lining up to outline their strategies and claim a slice of the market. Forrester projects that the market for Cloud Computing services will increase from about $41 billion in 2011 to $241 billion in 2020.

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SunGard Availability Services has announced enhancements to PLANet, a Web-based business continuity planning tool for community banks and credit unions.

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Web hosting provider SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com) announced on Wednesday it has appointed four new executives to its leadership team.

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SunGard Availability Services announced today additions to its executive leadership team to fully support, develop and grow its services as well as further reinforce its leadership position in disaster recovery services, enterprise cloud services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

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SunGard Availability Services and EMC are presenting a Webcast on cloud computing-based disaster recovery. The Webcast will examine how virtualization and cloud-based services are creating new opportunities and challenges for designing and deploying cost-efficient disaster recovery solutions. It will review options and technologies for organizations to consider as they look into cloud-based disaster recovery that addresses their specific application and data recovery, and compliance requirements

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Recently many organizations have been looking to get out of the business of owning and maintaining their own information technology infrastructure. But for organizations new to the cloud, figuring out how to get started is a critical issue. Here are four considerations when evaluating cloud computing:

1. Business Assessment
2. Security
3. Compliance
4. Services and Service Level Agreements

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SunGard Availability Services has announced enhancements to PLANet, a Web-based business continuity planning tool for community banks and credit unions that helps ensure business continuity plans are constructed according to financial industry regulations and best practices.

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SAGINAW, Mich. – Family First CU has installed enhancements to the SunGard Availability Services’ PLANet web-based business continuity planning service

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Infrastructure-as-a-service provider SunGard Availability Services has added SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services to its Business Partner Program.

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SunGard Availability Services said it has boosted the ability of its Web-based continuity planning tool to help credit unions and community banks stay in compliance and lower risk.

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SunGard Availability Services, a Wayne, PA-based provider of IT operations support, said that it has added enterprise cloud services to its channel portfolio to help partners capitalize on the cloud computing market by offering the vendor’s fully managed Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform.

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“Our Business Partners are essential to SunGard’s overall business success. We are excited to expand the program with our new Enterprise Cloud Services offer and provide an opportunity for our partners to differentiate themselves in the market,” said Melissa McCoy, vice president, Channel Programs, SunGard Availability Services. “With the addition of Enterprise Cloud Services to the existing portfolio of managed hosting and recovery services, companies can leverage the full suite of SunGard services to satisfy their customer’s requirements and create a recurring revenue stream for their business.”

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The company has also posted a video on its website featuring McCoy discussing the key features of the SunGard Business Partner Program.

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Many organizations are keenly aware of the importance of backing up data, but backup without data recovery does not provide effective business protection. At Storage Networking World, SunGard Availability Services (booth #501) will show organizations how to help reduce data loss and downtime risk while also cutting cost and complexity of backup and recovery processes.

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Following the disaster in Japan, Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing director at SunGard Availability Services and recognized international expert in data center design and architecture, offered the following four steps data center managers should take to protect their infrastructure in the event of an earthquake.

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If 2010 was the year of cloud computing awareness and adoption, the next phase of the cloud evolution will bring maturation and convergence according to SunGard Availability Services.

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Melissa McCoy, vice president of channel programs at SunGard Availability Services, said next month the company will offer its Enterprise Cloud Services to members of its Solution Provider Program and launch a new set of tools and resources that help partners sell the cloud.

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Naturally, this month’s devastation in Japan has turned the attention toward earthquake-preparedness, says Mickey Zandi, managing director at SunGard Availability Services. “Companies want to know how to secure the facility not only from a building and structural point of view but also coming from the perspective of the actual data center and the elements in it,” he says.

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Whether it is data loss, corruption, or even a simple lack of data access, an organization needs to be confident that it can recover within a pre-determined time to avoid lost business. Data loss is not an option for companies of any size and, given the pressures IT organizations face from year to year, recovery processes often need a makeover just to keep pace. SunGard’s Secure2Disk portfolio addresses everything from SMBs to the enterprise; whether leveraging an existing data protection solution or implemented as a replacement, Secure2Disk offers solutions for companies of all sizes to address their data protection challenges.

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In a conversation with SunGard's Indu Kodukula at Cloud Connect 2011, a UBM TechWeb event, he told me that 90% of SunGard customers are now either using -- or at least experimenting with -- the virtual machine re-activation at a remote site as their disaster recovery mechanism.

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SunGard Availability Services entered the Dublin market in a major way with its March 210 acquisition of Hosting 365, a managed hosting provider with two data centers in Dublin. SunGard said the deal provided it with “access to a new geographic market and proven cloud computing expertise.”

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According to eWeek, the horrific crisis is a clear reminder to IT managers about their own business continuity systems and how well-prepared they are for such an event. "First of all, everybody should be threat-aware at all times," Bill Hughes, a business continuity specialist at SunGard Availability Services, said. "They also should be looking at all their company's locations and supply chain in terms of people, when they are checking their data centre resilience and data recovery systems.”

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In an email conversation with the WHIR, Rob Walters, vice president of product management at SunGard Availability Services discussed the company's new enterprise cloud services and how they differ from competing products in the market.

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"First of all, everybody should be threat-aware at all times," Bill Hughes, a business continuity specialist at SunGard Availability Services, told eWEEK. "They also should be looking at all their company's locations and supply chain in terms of people, when they are checking their data center resiliency and data recovery systems."

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Misconception 2: The Cloud Is Risky
"There is an assumption that somehow the public or enterprise cloud that is shared is somehow more risky than traditional infrastructure. The risk is essentially old wine in new bottles. All the risks in the cloud are addressable." -Indu Kodukula, CTO and Executive Vice President of Products, SunGard Availability Services

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Often resource constrained, IT departments in companies and government organizations are immersed in workday responsibilities needed to support the business. Cloud computing can help take pressure off IT staff while also helping deliver measurable business benefits. For instance, with cloud computing, organizations can leverage the benefits of a shared IT infrastructure without having to implement and administer it directly.

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Mickey Zandi, managing principal, Consulting Services, at SunGard Availability Services, agreed. "Uptime is always driven by the business and supported by IT," he said. "To determine availability metrics, we first interview the business and then the IT team. We identify the core business measures for success, which typically revolve around revenue, cost and profit. Next, we identify what are the infrastructure components that drive those mission-critical applications and measure the business impact of downtime."

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Mickey Zandi, managing principal, Consulting Services, at SunGard Availability Services, agreed. "Uptime is always driven by the business and supported by IT," he said. "To determine availability metrics, we first interview the business and then the IT team. We identify the core business measures for success, which typically revolve around revenue, cost and profit. Next, we identify what are the infrastructure components that drive those mission-critical applications and measure the business impact of downtime."

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Virtualization Review Editor in Chief Bruce Hoard recently interviewed Rahul Bakshi, VP of Solution Design for Managed Services at SunGard Availability Services. They talked about the demand for virtualization and cloud services.

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While in the last year cloud computing experienced a great wave of awareness and adoption, the next phase of the cloud evolution will bring greater maturation and convergence. For many organizations, the previous year proved that cloud computing can meet the demand for improved IT efficiency.

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Today’s business environment requires CFOs to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Considering cloud computing, a CFO will likely hear a lot of hype, but the most important thing to consider in a cloud solution is “which business problems do I want to solve?

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“Security is a big concern for Cycle30 and our customers. However, SunGard’s cloud offers unique flexibility in provisioning resources and that allows us to leverage our corporate security systems. We can present and protect the cloud resources as if they were inside our security perimeter. A similar approach is possible when incorporating cloud resources into high availability and disaster recovery planning.”

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Somerset Technology Park will be the ninth data center development in the past decade for Russo Development. One of the company’s recent projects was a huge new data center for NYSE Euronext in northern New Jersey. Russo has also done build-to-suit data centers for Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and SunGard Availability Services.

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Cloud computing is "a network that uses virtualization technologies to allow computing applications and data to be provided flexibly from a pool of hardware resources," according to disaster recovery, managed services and IT consulting company SunGard Availability Services.

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“Too often, IT personnel get steeped in tactics and don’t delegate well enough, becoming a single point of failure,” says Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com).

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Rehearsals really matter in disaster recovery planning. “The key to recovery preparedness is people who know what they’re supposed to do (and not supposed to do), when, [and] how, in concert with who or what,” says Bill Hughes, director of consulting services at SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com).

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One recently public customer is SunGard, which built its new Enterprise Cloud Services offering atop a VBlock foundation.

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SunGard on Wednesday announced its entry in the cloud storage space with the introduction of Enterprise Cloud Services, built on Vblock technology from VMware, Cisco and EMC.

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SunGard Availability Services on Wednesday announced its entry in the cloud storage space with the introduction of Enterprise Cloud Services, built on Vblock technology from VMware, Cisco and EMC.

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SunGard had been rolling out their enterprise cloud services on a customer-by-customer basis as early as August 2010, when Cycle30 signed up. And SunGard’s press release on the official, public launch of their IaaS offering indicates that Cycle30 is happy with their early jump onto the bandwagon thanks to the “millions” they’ve saved.

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The product comes into the market at a time when the company believes that it is right for a fully managed IaaS solution which also helps clients address critical business challenges. A holistic possibility of financial flexibility, provisioning speed and service should build a base of satisfied customers for SunGard. Clients like Cycle30 have saved several million dollars with Enterprise Cloud Solution from SunGard.

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SunGard Availability Services announced the general availability in North America of its Enterprise Cloud Services which will help customers tap into the efficiency and cost advantages of a fully managed cloud environment with enterprise-grade application availability and security.

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SunGard VP of product management Rob Walters said launch of the IaaS solution was aimed at addressing customers’ critical business challenges. “Our customers do not want to trade service for the financial flexibility and speed of provisioning that cloud offers. They want both - and now they can have it.”

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In a release, the Vice President of Product Management at SunGard Availability Services, Mr. Rob Walters, said that, "With the launch of our fully managed, Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution, our goal is to deliver not just an IT solution, but to address critical business challenges for our customers. Our customers do not want to trade service for the financial flexibility and speed of provisioning that cloud offers. They want both - and now they can have it."

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“Cycle30 has saved millions of dollars by using SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services,” said Jim Dunlap, president of Cycle30. “Speed-to-market was important to Cycle30 and the cloud was a big help there. SunGard’s IaaS solution allowed us to turn up our platform quickly, and that experience gave us confidence that SunGard will help us serve customers on accelerated timelines.”

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“With the launch of our fully managed, Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution, our goal is to deliver not just an IT solution, but to address critical business challenges for our customers,” Rob Walters, vice president of product management at SunGard Availability Services said in a statement. “Our customers do not want to trade service for the financial flexibility and speed of provisioning that cloud offers. They want both - and now they can have it.”

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“Enterprises around the globe have trusted SunGard with their most secure, mission-critical applications and infrastructure to provide continuous business operations for years," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "SunGard is now leveraging that expertise and experience to deliver organizations a secure, highly available enterprise cloud service. ESG expects that organizations familiar with SunGard's heritage of delivering enterprise-class solutions will want to put SunGard on the short list of cloud services they are considering."

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SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services include both multi-tenant and dedicated private cloud solutions and options for intrusion detection, which provide an added level of security for customer environments, and database services that enable management of SQL databases.

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SunGard Availability Services (AS), a division of SunGard Data Systems, has just reached a significant milestone as the general availability of SunGard Enterprise Cloud is scheduled to be commercially available on January 31 after spending five months in private beta and another four months in controlled availability. SunGard's latest foray (the managed service provider has made available private clouds running on dedicated VMware environments since 2008) into the multi-tenant Enterprise Cloud is an indication of the market evolution, one that began to get serious in the hosting industry during the past 18 months when a raft of hosting companies were under fire from investors and customers to provide new business models. Although SunGard's core business is in the managed services arena, which is still a growth segment in the hosting industry, a tidal wave of cloud frenzy is rising fast and it's hard to ignore.

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But all was not lost. TMC had a contract with SunGard for archiving and disaster recovery services, which helped immensely in the storm’s aftermath, says Fink. Data were stored off-site, and the SunGard services allowed TMC off-site access to its pharmacy system, so the hospital could get to pertinent patient data even before power was restored at the facility. “We could have restored additional patient systems through the SunGard services, but with no patients at any of the hospitals, we instead focused our efforts on restoring power to the local data center,” he says.

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More than any other, power monitoring is the catch phrase for 2011. Watch for there to be stricter and more frequent reviews of power needs and how to reduce the overall demand within data centers, says David Matusow, an architect with the Center of Excellence at SunGard Availability Services (www.availability.sungard.com). More companies will want to increase the monitoring of data demands by various pieces of technology. “Currently, very few organizations do an actual review of their demand and how it can be reduced,” Matusow says. “This is changing. Some of this change is a direct result of data center managers taking on more facilities requirements, such as utility monitoring. This is leading the data center managers to be accountable for the power and its associated cost, which is resulting in far more review and investigation.”

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SunGard's Availability Services division is gearing up its Enterprise Cloud Service, which has been in controlled availability (in a full production environment) after a period of private beta in April 2010, through integrating Nimsoft's monitoring system (NMS) into its cloud platform.

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With NMS as the basis for its new cloud offering, SunGard can reduce the risk of setting high service expectations while knowing these optimized service levels can be tracked on behalf of the client and visualized in client-facing service dashboards.

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Nimsoft announced that SunGard has selected the Nimsoft Monitoring System (NMS) as the underlying platform for its new cloud services offering, giving its clients high availability and rapid elasticity, while providing true automation that simplifies service management. “Our customers rely on us to provide highly available services to support their mission critical applications,” said Rob Walters, vice president of product management at SunGard. “Nimsoft intuitive APIs enable us to provide comprehensive, proactive managed services and allow us to deploy customized monitoring policies on the fly.”

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One of the most widely adopted cloud applications in the IBM i community may be data vaulting and hosted disaster recovery (DR) services. By sending their data over the wire to companies like Vault400 and SafeData (which was recently acquired by Data Storage Corp.), IBM i shops are getting rid of their tape drives and tape-based backup processes, while keeping data safe from outages and disaster. The Seagate subsidiary i365 (formerly EVault) is making a business out of licensing its data vaulting technology to data center operators, who in turn offer vaulting services to customers--a franchise model that appears to be spreading rapidly. More IBM i shops are also expected to invest more in hosted DR and high availability (HA) services next year. Vision Solutions and Maxava both have data center partners who offer their DR and HA software to customers through a hosted model; SunGard Availability Services and IBM BCRS will also do well at the higher end of the market. The disk to disk (D2D) and virtual tape library (VTL) appliance market should also expand next year, as IBM i shops look for all-in-one devices that can satisfy backup, encryption, replication, and data de-duplication requirements. This market is expanding; ExaGrid added IBM i and DB2/400 support to its disk-to-disk (D2D) appliance just three months ago. Other D2D vendors supporting IBM i and DB2/400 data include Unitrends , and Crossroads Systems , EMC, LaserVault, Tributary Systems (which acquired D2D product from Gresham Storage Solutions), and Quantum.

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Offering its clients high availability and rapid elasticity, SunGard has selected the Nimsoft Monitoring System (NMS) as the underlying platform for its new cloud services offering.

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Nimsoft, a software and technology services companies, has said that its Nimsoft Monitoring Systems (NMS) has been selected by SunGard as the underlying platform for its new cloud services offering, giving its clients availability and elasticity, providing automation that simplifies service management.

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Rahul Bakshi, vice president of product management, managed services, SunGard Availability Services, spoke to Arthur Cole about the private cloud and what enterprises can do to make the transition to third-party infrastructure run smoothly.

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Rahul Bakshi, vice president of managed services strategy and solutions design at SunGard Availability Services, said the new standard also impacts monitoring and reporting. In that area, the standard provides additional clarify around “not just being able to monitor things, but also making sure you are actually capturing the data you are monitoring,” Bakshi said.

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Some companies assign disaster recovery planning responsibilities to their security groups, but others focus on databases, servers and networks rather than security reviews in their planning, says William Hughes, director, consulting services BC/DR Center of Excellence at SunGard Availability Services. "They're not as involved as they should be," he says of security teams.

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SunGard Availability Services revealed that there was a remarkable increase in adoption of cloud computing services in 2010. This awareness is expected to lead to the next phase of the cloud evolution, which will bring more maturation and convergence.

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According to SunGard sources the conference will feature a presentation by Dominick Paul, vice president of Recovery Services Solution Design at SunGard Availability Services, on “Application Availability for Heterogeneous Environments.” Paul will outline effective approaches to the IT challenge of maintaining application availability in multi-platform environments at the session. The session is scheduled to take place on Dec. 7.

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Often resource-constrained, IT departments in companies and government organizations are immersed in workday responsibilities needed to support the business. Cloud computing can help take pressure off IT staff while also helping deliver measurable business benefits. For instance, with cloud computing, organizations can leverage the benefits of a shared IT infrastructure without having to implement and administer it directly.

Satish Hemachandran is Director of Product Management at SunGard Availability Services where he is responsible for defining the product strategy and direction for SunGard's utility platform and services.

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Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, SunGard Availability Services (www.sungardas.com), says administrators should create an interdependency matrix showing how applications and systems are interrelated and then identify and coordinate the sequences that need to occur during the move. The interdependency analysis will reveal which users are impacted by the move, thus helping administrators communicate with those users before the move occurs.

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Adm. Thad Allen, the noted disaster management and recovery expert who led the national incident response to the worst oil spill in US history, will deliver the keynote address at the 2011 SunGard Business Continuity Software International User Group Forum on April 17-19, 2011 in San Diego, Calif.

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SunGard Availability Services, a provider of disaster recovery services and business continuity management software, has launched a blog series aiming at industry conversations on how to improve business and IT availability.

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SunGard Availability Services has recently launched a blog series aimed at advancing industry conversations on how to improve business and IT availability.

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Nick Magliato has been named chief operations officer at SunGard Availability Services L.P., Wayne. He joined SunGard from IT-consulting firm CRGT Inc.

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Nick Magliato has been named chief operations officer at SunGard Availability Services. Mr. Magliato will lead SunGard Availability Services’ infrastructure engineering and operations organizations, and is responsible for operational excellence. With more than 20 years of industry experience, Mr. Magliato has held leadership roles at both large-scale organizations and early stage venture-backed companies. He joined SunGard from IT consulting firm CRGT, Inc., where he was responsible for leading the organization’s growth through acquisitions and organic development. www.sungardas.com

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Chris Burgher, a security consultant with SunGard Availability Services, says that rather than getting all wrapped up in trying to prove that there is an actual return to be made on security investments, it's best to confront business leaders with the simple fact that security is a real cost of doing business.

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What we may not know is that SunGard Availability Services is a customer-friendly company that is interested in being a business partner at the same time it is a service provider. Jim Dunlap, president of Cycle30--a subsidiary of GCI, Alaska's largest telecommunications and cable provider--found that out on his way to selecting the SunGard Availability Services enterprise-grade cloud platform to implement Cycle30's billing services for its cable, telecom, and utility customers across North America. According to Dunlap, "If you look at their financial picture, it tends to give you a lot of confidence, but it really had much more to do with the people we met.

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SunGard had a grand opening of its new Carlstadt, N.J., data center dedicated to colocation and managed services. According to Frank Casey, VP, Service Transition Lead, at SunGard, which is well known for disaster recovery, the company has been providing managed services, hosting and colocation services for a while, but is adding new dedicated white space with separate infrastructure facilities for colo customers at its Carlstadt data center.

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“Think of [data] as a Halloween costume,” Zandi says. “You don’t leave things that you wear once a year in the closet, in front of your face. You move them to the basement where you know where they are but only access it when you need it. That’s why a storage retention policy is key to understanding the best approach, based on what the requirements are.”

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Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, SunGard Availability Services (www.availability.sungard.com), says SMEs that need to recover from a disaster must understand the level of system interaction and interdependency. Admins must know what is in that data center and the applications, systems, components, and elements operating in the data center. Then, personnel must understand how those components are linked to each other.

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With more than 5 million square feet of colocation space, SunGard Availability Services is best known as a leading player in the market for disaster recovery and business continuity services. But SunGard also offers a full suite of managed services as well as consulting services that help companies modernize their data center infrastructure. Dr. Mickey Zandi, Managing Principal at SunGard Availability, is responsible for the company’s data center and IT consulting practices. Zandi has more than 14 years experience in data center design and infrastructure optimization. Zandi agreed to an email question-and-answer session to share some of his experiences with data center design and the cost of building new facilities.

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SunGard Availability Services announced the expansion of its New York Metro area data center campus in order to meet the growing demands of colocation and managed services. Company sources added that the expansion will enable customers to meet IT infrastructure demands with respect to IT infrastructure needs without spending on building and running their own data centers.

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"Developers can't overlook how their production environments will be supported on the cloud platform, as they may find themselves supporting the production environment without the help of a system administration team," says Chip Childers, chief architect of SunGard Availability Services' Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Services. "While cloud offerings provide easy access to infrastructure services, they often require customers to maintain everything inside the environment."

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One way in which the infrastructure informs your software design and coding is how cloud platform vendors get paid. Points out Chip Childers, chief architect of SunGard Availability Services' Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure Services, "Each piece of infrastructure you use in cloud computing is something you are charged for."

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SunGard Availability Services has added 12,000 sq ft of raised floor to its Carlstadt data center in the New York metropolitan for its colocation and managed hosting services. It has also added an additional six megawatts of utility power, 2 N redundancy and a new UPS power systems – additions it said are important for allowing clients to undertake virtualization initiatives.

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Cyber-security is an ongoing process, not just a set of tools or a single implementation and training event, says Christopher Burgher, an associate principal with SunGard Availability Services Consulting. In this slideshow, he offers some basic steps toward a holistic, adaptive approach to threats from the Internet.

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When it comes to security, there’s a natural tendency to think in terms of technology. But in reality, a lack of security has more to do with the absence of processes to ensure that we have security than any particular missing piece of technology. With that in mind, Christopher Burgher, associate principal with SunGard Availability Services’ Security Consulting, has come up with five signs that would strongly indicate that your organization has no real process in place in terms of managing security.

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Image Microsystems, a provider of technology restoration, reverse logistics, e-waste recycling and recycled plastic products manufacturing, has selected SunGard Availability Services to provide colocation services. SunGard will provide colocation services to help Image Microsystems improve information availability and ensure data security without straining internal IT resources.

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For most companies, the best disaster recovery (DR) strategy is a blend of physical and virtual. The trick, of course, is in figuring out what goes where. To that end, it’s a good idea to determine the where and the what before the how.

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Virtualization is a useful tool, but it’s not a silver bullet. It creates new problems and exacerbates some existing ones.  Here are some things to watch out for when considering virtualizaton as part of your disaster recovery strategy.

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Make sure you know what you are buying and how it fits your actual needs. “For example, if you plan for a 24-hour recovery time objective (RTO), but your application and business needs require a four-hour RTO, then your plan – at any cost – will not be successful in meeting your requirements,” says Jim Grogan, senior director at SunGard Availability Services.

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It’s a point echoed by William Hughes, a director of SunGard Availability Services, which works with businesses on disaster planning. Hughes says that Katrina, the 2005 storm that almost wiped New Orleans off the map, has been a particular catalyst in reshaping attitudes about hurricanes. “Before Katrina, people had certain assumptions about the duration” of time an area would remain affected by a storm, he says.

After Katrina? “All those assumptions changed,” he adds.

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David Matusow, a Center of Excellence architect at SunGard Availability Services, says companies must start to review their energy demands now and not wait until a hard limit is reached. "Reviewing now provides a company with the time and insight required to make adjustments prior to hitting a solid stop point," he says. "If a power limit is reached, a company must make difficult choices—are data center plans postponed or priorities? What is needed is an effective way to measure the current state and project impacts and demands." Matusow says capacity planning must include not only processor cycles but also infrastructure requirements.

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Rancho Cordova Mayor Ken Cooley attended SunGard Availability Services’ recent Open House at its new managed services data center in the Sacramento area. The facility offers high-density, raised floor space and a full suite of managed services including virtualization for primary and replicated customer applications, data storage and backups, security, monitoring and cloud computing infrastructure.

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Data center and IT managers should have data classification initiatives to audit their systems and allow the right placement of data,” says Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, SunGard Availability Services (www.availability.sungard.com). “Organizations need to ‘right-size’ their storage environment. Data can be moved to less-expensive SATA or tape storage. . . . Improvements can often be made by knowing what has to be backed up to the most expensive disk files and removing or cleaning up what is currently considered lower-tiered data.

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SunGard's Storage Replication Service uses a combination of EMC RecoverPoint/SE and SunGard's AdvancedRecovery services running on EMC Clariion arrays, with the replication handled at a secure SunGard data center.

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Safety National, a provider of excess workers' compensation coverage, has deployed SunGard Availability Services' Secure2Disk Powered by Data Domain for offsite data backup. SunGard initially launched Secure2Disk last year with a SunGard-managed appliance on the customer's premise to gather data locally and replicate it to the SunGard data center. Secure2Disk Powered by Data Domain is based on Data Domain data deduplication appliances. SunGard also said Secure2Disk Powered by Data Domain and SunGard's integration with EMC RecoverPoint replication are the first service provider offerings to be included in the EMC Select co-marketing program.

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SunGard Availability Services has opened a new workforce continuity facility in Federal Way, Washington, to provide customers with business continuity, disaster recovery and testing services.

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Information technology has gained an increasing influence on companies throughout the world. This influence and impact is based on its penetration into wide-ranging business needs. The result has been an explosion of servers, data storage, and network connections to support these demands.

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The SunGard Availability Services’ Rancho Cordova center — nestled in a neighborhood of other data centers — will mostly provide co-location or disaster recovery for companies’ mission-critical businesses. It also will provide services that allow companies to outsource their computer system or storage needs.

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David Matusow, Center of Excellence architect at Sungard Availability Services (www.availability.sungard.com), says one of the biggest mistakes is looking for the exotic. Often, he adds, it’s the simple solutions that are both the easiest to implement and the fastest to get done and have very significant areas of improvement.

For example, Matusow says simple things such as implementing sleep modes on servers and lighting can result in very sizeable gains without the need to incur capital expenditures requiring top management approval levels.

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Another way to detect potential problems that can impact availability is conducting frequent resiliency audits. Dr. Mickey S. Zandi, managing principal, consulting services, SunGard Availability Services (www.availability.sungard.com), says that such audits can help data center managers understand their distribution of power, utilization, and consumption.

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“Security is a balance of trade-offs, and it is generally not a good idea to spend more dollars on securing an item than the item itself is worth,” says Glen Seimetz, solution architect in availability/security consulting at SunGard Availability Services (www.availability.sungard.com). “It is also not prudent to restrict yourself in a security straightjacket so that business flexibility and competitiveness are crippled—that’s a very high price to pay.”

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Main Line Health system in Pennsylvania has selected SunGard Availability Services to provide managed services for its primary data center.

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In a move intended to maximize the effectiveness of its limited IT staff, non-profit health system Main Line Health has awarded a contract for managed services to SunGard Availability Services. Under the agreement, SunGard will manage the Mail Line Health’s IT infrastructure and provide remote support across Philadelphia-area hospitals.

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SunGard's vBlock-based service a good match
Satish Hemachandran, director of product management for SunGard Availability Services, said SunGard had developed an in-house management portal on top of its vBlock installation for users that integrates with VMware management capabilities but was more than simple access to a vSphere console.

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