By VSM News Staff

published: Monday, May 05 2008

Industry Leaders Team to Deliver Availability and Disaster Preparedness.

Wayne, Pa., May 5, 2008 - SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of information availability solutions, today announced a partnership with VMware, Inc.  This strategic partnership will help organizations leverage VMware's proven virtualization platform with open access to SunGard's vast infrastructure, providing secondary data center facilities. 

Ensuring availability and recoverability of applications, systems and technology in the face of disruptions is a requirement for today's organizations. While 24-48-hour recovery windows were commonplace five years ago, many business leaders now require IT to recover systems in less than eight hours, with even more aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs) coming soon.  However, the complexity of recovery, the cost of protection, and the lack of geographically diverse facilities often prevent organizations from delivering solutions that meet these aggressive availability requirements and RTOs. 

SunGard provides disaster recovery process expertise and automation combined with an enterprise-class IT infrastructure -- a protocol-independent network, hardened facilities and redundant power systems.  In addition, the company's 100% recovery success rate managing declarations in its 30-year history leads the industry. The partnership between the two companies will help organizations to overcome the cost, complexity, and infrastructure barriers that make comprehensive protection of their computing infrastructure prohibitively difficult to achieve.  SunGard will leverage VMware virtualization to help create a suite of simple, fully-managed AdvancedRecovery(SM) services, including managed virtual recovery services, expected to be available later this year.

"Using VMware virtualization with SunGard can help organizations effectively minimize unplanned downtime, deliver higher levels of availability and be better prepared in the event of a disaster," said Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president, worldwide field operations, VMware.  "Together, we are delivering customers a powerful joint solution that helps enable a disaster-resilient IT infrastructure, with the simplicity of a managed service offering."

"VMware's virtualization platform is transforming disaster recovery by helping companies to protect a wide range of applications and data," said Frank Casey, vice president of product strategy, SunGard Availability Services.  "We are working with VMware to create a faster, centralized and automated information availability service to help organizations of all sizes that need to protect both virtual and traditional IT environments.  It is the next stage of SunGard's commitment to delivering AdvancedRecovery solutions to companies with varying IT infrastructure needs, and we are tapping the best minds and technologies in the industry to make this happen."

About SunGard Availability Services

SunGard Availability Services is the pioneer and leading provider of information availability solutions, helping to ensure that 10,000 customers in North America and Europe have access to their business-critical information systems. With four 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 www.availability.sungard.com or call 1-800-523-4970.

About SunGard

With annual revenue of $5 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 www.sungard.com.

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.