SunGard adds multi-site redundancy; eyes 'continuous uptime'

IT software and services company SunGard on Monday announced that it has added multi-site support for its enterprise-grade cloud services to allow for fully redundant architecture for higher availability or in the event of a failure.

The new feature provides customers with two geographically-distinct production sites, integrated with recovery capabilities. The goal: a "seamless cloud" for high demand applications -- or when disaster strikes.

A chief concern among IT managers looking to cloud services is downtime. Sure, the cloud is on demand and cheap, but if it's unavailable it's useless.

SunGard is trying to bridge this gap by allowing for two separate enterprise-grade cloud instances to provide geographic load-balancing, making an active-active environment more feasible. Its products are built on VMware, Cisco and EMC's Vblock tech and support Microsoft Exchange Server, MS Active Directory and Hosted BlackBerry Services.

For non-high-availability applications, the multi-site capability means quicker recovery. SunGard says it can be operational within four hours in the event that the primary cloud site experiences an outage.

The company's claims are backed by contractual service level agreements promising 99.95 percent cloud infrastructure availability.

"Organizations today operate in a hybrid world of cloud, colocation and managed services. They don't want critical information trapped in silos," said SunGard's Rob Walters in a statement. "SunGard's ability to interconnect these environments helps ensure data from legacy environments can easily be shared with cloud-based applications to maximize business value."