SunGard Availability Services Announces Virtualization-Based Infrastructure and Services Initiative

WAYNE, Pa., Feb. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- SunGard Availability Services today unveiled its virtualization-based infrastructure and services initiative, which will extend its portfolio of information availability services to include additional virtualization- and automation-based IT recovery, end-user recovery, high availability and managed services. These services will provide organizations a cost-effective way to achieve recovery timeframes of less than four hours. And for times when business situations require companies to scale up their operations for short-term requirements, these services provide "capacity-on-demand."

Based on customer objectives for information availability, SunGard continues to utilize advanced technologies such as virtualization and automation to run, restore and recover IT environments.

"Recovery is becoming more complex as business and IT requirements increasingly become more intertwined- while at the same time the availability targets for these systems and applications have never been higher," said David Tapper, program director, Outsourcing, Utility and Offshore Services at IDC. "This new initiative leverages SunGard's core competencies in keeping people, systems and information continuously working together and combines them with virtualization technologies to make recovery processes more agile and help meet increased expectations."

SunGard's virtualization-based infrastructure and services initiative will help to simplify recovery, testing, quality assurance and production applications for enterprises striving for information availability at all times. The initiative builds on SunGard's disaster recovery and AdvancedRecovery(SM) capabilities, which provide businesses with options for their risk mitigation; for data monitoring, managing, and protecting; and for rapid hardware provisioning.

"More and more, as companies need to recover faster from IT interruptions or disasters-agility has become a business and IT requirement," said Don Norbeck, director, product development at SunGard Availability Services. "Through this initiative, SunGard is leveraging virtualization and automation technologies- combined with its portfolio of IT and end-user recovery services, high availability solutions and managed services-to help companies reduce recovery times and help mitigate risks quickly and cost-effectively."

  SunGard expects initial customer deployments to begin this year.

  About SunGard Availability Services

SunGard Availability Services is the pioneer and leading provider of information availability solutions, helping to ensure that nearly 10,000 customers in North America and Europe have access to their business-critical information systems. With over 3 million square feet of secure facilities, SunGard offers a complete range of information availability solutions that include managed IT, professional and business continuity services. SunGard provides services to support an always-on production environment, as well as over 30 technology platforms to support customers who require a traditional 24-48 hour recovery time frame. SunGard also has technology and systems management services for application and data center outsourcing, as well as business continuity consulting services and planning software. For more information about SunGard Availability Services, visit http://www.availability.sungard.com/ or call 1-800-523-4970.

About SunGard

With annual revenue of $4 billion, SunGard is a global leader in software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also helps information-dependent enterprises of all types to ensure the continuity of their business. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 50 countries, including the world's 50 largest financial services companies. Visit SunGard at http://www.sungard.com/.

Trademark Information: SunGard and the SunGard logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.