High-availability systems infrastructure specialist SunGard said on Wednesday that it has opened a second data centre in London. The new centre complements a similar facility near Heathrow airport and offers very high resiliency with no single points of failure, according to SunGard.
Dubbed the Technology Centre 2, or TC2, the centre is a 1,000 square-metre facility in London's Docklands with a combination of rack space hosting, platform and device monitoring, security and network management and operating system and data base management.
Keith Tilley, managing director of SunGard UK, acknowledged that the world of resilient and reliable data services has become very competitive but claimed that SunGard's "dual-site solution will enable customers to stay in business at a fraction of the cost of buying, or building, their own dedicated solution".
Using TC2, SunGard says that services will be continuously available "no matter how large the traffic peaks". Maintaining traffic and response times is often an issue for data centres, but TC2 will use load balancing between TC2 and SunGard’s original resilient data centre, the London Technology Centre (LTC), at Heathrow.
The load balancing is possible because of a new, high-bandwidth optical metropolitan area network that has been added, connecting the two data centres through dedicated fibre routes; the two centres are close enough together for there to be synchronous storage replication between them.
SunGard claims that it is the only provider of a geographically separate, dual resilient tier IV data centre in the UK. The mirrored solution also gives SunGard resilient connectivity, power and cooling to deliver the optimum operating environment for its customers’ IT equipment.
SunGard’s TC2 hosted Managed IT Solutions also offer customers the ability to asynchronously replicate disk space for their own clients.
The announcement is part of Business Continuity Awareness Week which runs from 13 March to 19 March.
