Sungard Availability Services Expands Recovery-as-a-Service Portfolio

Sungard Availability Services introduced data management and cloud recovery services that reduce recovery times and costs for organizations managing disparate, hybrid environments.

The RaaS portfolio expansion includes Recover2Cloud for Actifio and Managed Vaulting and Backup for Actifio and Recover2Cloud for Server Replication for AIX and iSeries.

The company is also introducing a Recovery-as-a-Service customer portal to allow self-service on recovery tasks.

The partnership with Actifio introduces a Recover2Cloud service based on Actifio resiliency director. This service along with Managed Vaulting and Backup, offers customers a backup, replication and recovery service in a RaaS, per month, per gigabyte model. With virtualized data management, it delivers an application-centric solution to streamline the management of data growth across heterogeneous storage, network and server infrastructure.

“We‘re excited that Sungard AS has chosen Actifio for their new cloud-offerings, and to be working closely with them on our resiliency director product to help bring the power of copy data virtualization to more customers as they move to the cloud,” said Actifio founder and CEO, Ash Ashutosh. “As demonstrated by our early joint successes, Sungard AS and Actifio share a single focus – to absolutely delight our users. Sungard AS customers now have the ability to enhance availability for their business critical applications, from the datacenter core to the cloud.“

Recover2Cloud for server replication protects applications that operate on AIX and iSeries.

It allows:

• Data and applications to be restored to a near-zero recovery point;

• Full application environments that often are running domain-specific or vertical applications to be recovered in less than four to 12 hours; and

• Applications to restart without the delay and risk of a data restore process.

“Recover2Cloud for Server Replication provides MCM Corp with the assurance that the data that runs everything we do is always available, ensuring success in our complex insurance industry,” said Adamis Rivera Jr., manager of computer operations, MCM Corporation. “Until now, our only options for such applications were tape-based recovery and significant travel costs to secondary sites. We also appreciate its ease of use, our confidence in replicated data and the ability to role swap quickly should a possible disaster loom.“

Addressing the challenges that face organizations, Steve Duplessie, senior analyst and founder of the Enterprise Strategy Group, explains: “As companies continue to seek the best route for storage and recovery, they realize the challenges and realities of their hybrid environments. With unplanned downtime and data loss still top of mind, CIOs seek greater agility and consistent recovery performance across their cloud, virtual and physical environments. It‘s a game of confidence, understanding how recoverable their business truly is.“

“By introducing services that leverage new technology to manage established and increasingly complex environments, Sungard AS assists organizations to reduce the risks of critical data operations,” he concluded.

The portal provides customers visibility into information such as service health, protection status, usage and alerts. Customers can track single servers across dashboards to determine current and historical performance, which aids in determining efficiencies for specific servers.

Shorenstein Realty Services, Inc. one of the country’s oldest commercial real estate firms, evaluated the portal for several months. The company’s VP, IT infrastructure and operations, Grayson Lawrence complimented the design of the portal and noted that the portal provides status update on all systems at any given time, “It is easy to confirm that things are replicating in our production environment, and I look forward to visibility of everything from capacity to contract details.“

“The Recovery as a Service market continues to evolve rapidly, and we‘re dedicated to providing customers the services they need for their complex, hybrid IT environments,” said Souvik Choudhury, VP of product management, Sungard AS. “By adding Actifio solutions to our existing RaaS portfolio, customers can reduce the complexity of maintaining HA in the most complex environments. Sungard AS continues its” mission to recover customers” entire business while providing the highest level of availability for their most critical applications.”