SunGard Availability Services Launches Remote Console

Published 31st March 2008

Remote Console Helps Improve Recovery Time and Decrease Testing Costs...

London, UK: 26 March 2008: SunGard Availability Services, the pioneer and leading provider of information availability and business continuity services, has launched Remote Console, a new product which helps organisations to securely administer an IT recovery via the Internet from anywhere in the world where there is connectivity.

Remote Console helps eliminate recovery time delays caused by IT personnel travelling to disaster recovery facilities following an incident or during testing. In addition, Remote Console no longer constrains customers to administer recovery from SunGard’s Recovery Centres or named customer sites. It provides mobile workers the flexibility to perform a number of key procedures as though they were sitting beside the server hardware itself. These procedures include loading and recovering operating systems, installing drivers or patches and configuring devices and file systems. All these procedures are done through a secure Internet connection to recovery servers housed in one of SunGard’s recovery locations.

As a component of SunGard’s Enhanced Recovery Service, further reductions in recovery time may be achieved by using “ready to go warm recovery servers” that are preloaded with customers’ server images. The powerful combination of Remote Console and Enhanced Recovery means that SunGard can offer customers Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), the time it takes to resume operations following a system outage, of 6-9 hours when subscribing to a managed IT service.

The remote functionality of the new service also addresses the growing problem of the scarcity of high quality local data centre space in South East England. It also allows UK organisations that outsource their IT development and system administration services to Asia to manage their systems remotely. In addition to helping save time and money, this approach also helps organisations to reduce their carbon footprint by reducing the need for air travel.

Keith Tilley, executive vice president UK and Europe, SunGard Availability Services, said: “It can take up to 24 hours for an organisation to recover from a major IT failure. Much of this time is lost on IT personnel physically travelling to the data centre to start the recovery process. Remote Console removes this delay. By allowing IT professionals to manage the recovery remotely, with the same flexibility as they would enjoy sitting alongside the hardware itself, SunGard can help customers to not only decrease RTOs and the costs associated with recovery and testing but also contribute to reducing their organisation’s carbon footprint.”