SunGard Offers 'Hot Site' Service for Clouds

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.

SunGard's Enterprise Cloud Services now includes a fully redundant "active-active" architecture comprised of separate cloud instances in two data centers in different locations, to provide geographic load-balancing. For cloud applications that don't require a high availability architecture, SunGard offers a managed multi-site recovery option, in which a secondary cloud site can provide full recovery within four hours if the primary cloud site experiences an outage.

“The SunGard cloud is inherently redundant, but with these enhancements, SunGard Enterprise Cloud Services customers can now expect even greater availability assurances for applications hosted in the cloud,” said Rob Walters, vice president of product management, SunGard Availability Services.

Managed Cloud Recovery for VM-Based Apps

At VMworld, SunGard Availability Services also announced Recover2Cloud, which leverages SunGard's cloud infrastructure to provide managed recovery services for customers running virtual machines in their data centers. With Recover2Cloud, SunGard assumes recovery responsibility on behalf of an organization, deploying a recovery solution and performing the recovery in the event of an outage.

The Recover2Cloud offering includes:

A storage virtualization service is expected to be released later this year.

“In the world of application availability, there is no one-size-fits-all solution” said Larry Coble, senior vice president and general manager, recovery services at SunGard Availability Services. “Leveraging a cloud platform enables us to expand the recovery options we offer to our customers, both as stand-alone services and as part of tiered recovery solutions. Based on what we’re hearing from customers, the managed recovery aspect we are building into many of our services is expected to help deliver significant value. It is an area where in-house knowledge is often missing, and where SunGard has significant experience.”