London, UK – 17 June, 2009: SunGard Availability Services added another highly resilient data centre to its UK portfolio: Technology Centre 3 (TC3), in Surrey. The purpose built data centre for Information Availability provides SunGard customers with additional data centre facilities, dedicated to delivering managed IT hosting including high availability solutions and cloud computing services. SunGard Availability Services is the pioneer and leading provider of Information Availability services and is the world’s fifth largest provider of IT managed hosting services*.
This new facility continues SunGard’s ongoing programme of enhancements to its managed IT services capabilities in the UK, which have doubled in the past 18 months. Over 600 businesses trust SunGard to manage their production equipment across its four fully resilient UK data centres.
SunGard’s shared services model makes data centre space available at a fraction of the cost of any one company trying to buy, resource and power its own dedicated facility. The approach is becoming increasingly attractive as businesses, under ongoing cost pressures, shift spending from capital expenditure (capex) to operational expenditure (opex).
Steve Wallage, managing director of BroadGroup Consulting, a leading global data centre research and consulting group, said: "The market for third party data centre facilities in the UK is holding up extremely well. The attractions for users of outsourcing are higher than ever, as customers want to move costs from capex to opex, and are loathe to make the 10 year plus commitment of building their own facilities. That attractiveness is particularly strong in the case of highly regarded and credible suppliers such as SunGard who are able to offer such premium facilities as TC3 in Surrey."
SunGard’s model supports the growing number of businesses turning to cloud computing, offering them the opportunity to create an enterprise class ‘private cloud’ which combines the flexibility of virtualisation with dual-site or triple-site data centre resilience. Redundant systems are in place to help ensure maximum availability of the data centre at all times and all centres have carrier class connectivity to each other meaning customers can spread their ‘private cloud’ across multiple UK data centres reducing the risk of having all their environment in one data centre. Such tri-angulated connectivity to multiple SunGard Technology Centres means greater diversity, resilience and robustness for businesses.
Keith Tilley, managing director UK and executive vice president Europe for SunGard Availability Services, said: “There is much hype about ’the cloud’ and also an understandable reticence from CIOs who fear loss of control and security whilst pursuing the potential cost savings that cloud computing may offer. SunGard has a well developed shared services model which will allow our customers to buy into a ‘private cloud’ at a fraction of the cost of creating their own, but still maintaining integrity and flexibility.”
Tilley continued, "The important thing is not the cloud itself but the services it helps enable. At SunGard these include highly resilient data-vaulting solutions through to a suite of fully serviced managed IT offerings that shift capex to opex.. Buying into a shared infrastructure, which is an inherently ‘green’ solution, means customers win on two key fronts. In the current climate we are finding this is an easy option for our customers to take, proven by the fact we are delivering greater quantities of production data centre space every month to our customers.”
As with SunGard’s existing Technology Centres, TC3 provides managed services to give customers the IT resources, skills and experience to help ensure the availability, reliability, security and cost-efficiency of their production systems. Services include managed hosting, platform and device monitoring, security and network management, OS & database management, electronic data vaulting and replication. SunGard’s 30 years experience and expertise in Information Availability help ensure business critical systems are safely managed 24/7 by ‘intelligent hands’ while close proximity to the UK’s major business conurbations provides easy access for customers wishing to replicate their IT environments. Increasingly this includes protecting the availability and integrity of data created through cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models.
In common with all SunGard Technology Centres, TC3 has been designed and built to provide maximum building integrity, physical security and resilience in network and power provision; the site also joins SunGard’s network of data centres to provide the highest possible levels of resilience. Even in the highly unlikely event of a data centre falling victim to a catastrophic failure, SunGard’s customers can retain Information Availability by replicating their data and systems in additional centres on the network.
SunGard currently offers four highly resilient Technology Centres across the UK: the London Technology Centre (LTC) and TC2 – respectively sited West and East of London; TC4 in Elland, West Yorkshire; and TC3 in Woking, Surrey.
* Tier 1 research Spring 2009 - Managed Hosting Global Report.