SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of information availability and business continuity services, today announced that it has won a five year contract with The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) to help ensure that the University can continue operations in the wake of unplanned disruptions, whether man-made or natural.
The new agreement, which is scheduled to be fully implemented by the end of 2008, will see SunGard provide LSE with data centre space in two of its resilient data centres, its London Technology Centre, near West London and TC2 in London's Docklands. LSE will use SunGard's Electronic Vaulting to backup and recover all of its critical systems and data held on 97 servers, totalling over 40 terabytes of data, helping to ensure that students and staff are able to access critical information despite interruption.
SunGard will also provide LSE with its fully managed E-mail Availability Service (EAS) and provide archiving capability for the School’s e-mail system.
Adrian Ellison, assistant director in IT Services, said: "As with most organisations, our data is very much our crown jewels so it was imperative that we found the right partner to help protect and help ensure 24/7 availability of our critical systems. Having been out to tender, the decision to work with SunGard to improve our resilience was a fairly simple one; we believe SunGard had the best infrastructure and technological solutions, and we were very impressed by its people and support processes."
As well as providing resilient data centres and backup services, SunGard has also helped LSE to profile and better understand its data. The amount of data that LSE handles is growing by 40% each year. However, over 70% of the School’s data had not been accessed in six months. Understanding these trends has allowed LSE to better prioritise its recovery strategies and to improve the efficiency of data storage and backup.
Prior to working with SunGard, LSE had been running two on site data centres which, given its central London location next to the Royal Courts of Justice, put the University at some risk in terms of terrorism. With one data centre reaching the end of its useful life, LSE decided that its best option would be to outsource its information availability, data backup and recovery to SunGard which would provide data centres in two different parts of London. This option provides LSE with an added level of resilience as it reduces the likelihood of business interruption, even if a data centre goes offline.
Mr. Ellison noted: "The events of 7/7 brought home to us the importance of having alternative backup sites away from our campus in central London. We are now very much leading the way amongst our peers by adopting an outsourced and multi- location approach to data recovery and e-mail availability. Using SunGard's TC2 and LTC centres, we have an extremely high level of resilience without needing to worry about power supply and air cooling which were becoming major and expensive concerns."
Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe, SunGard Availability Services, said, “Like many organisations, universities are recognising that they can no longer afford downtime or non-availability of information. We are pleased to be working alongside LSE to demonstrate a best practice approach to information availability and data recovery and helping to ensure that staff and students alike can access the critical information they require at all times."