SunGard Availability Services is having a busy week, first announcing new managed services for Oracle and almost immediately afterwards disclosing a major build out in Boston.
The Oracle services are virtualization ready. This makes it easier to migrate from on-premises Oracle to the cloud, as the cloud itself is largely based on virtual infrastructure.
SunGard itself is a longtime Oracle user.
In fact, SunGard was profiled in an Oracle case study. According to Oracle, as SunGard added customers and its business grew, so did its data, basically tripling over the last half-decade.
SunGard, to whom clients look to simplify and rationalize their IT, asked for the same from Oracle. The database and ERP giant helped the service provider increase storage and at the same time consolidate hardware.
Oracle was the obvious choice as it provided technology to SunGard for the past 15 years. So now SunGard uses the Oracle Exadata Database Machine along with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance that came from Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Of course, having a certain technology in house makes it that much easier to support it as a service, which the MSP now does through SunGard Managed Oracle Services.
“We’re constantly seeking ways to help our customers optimize their environments while avoiding the headaches associated with application management,” said Joe Sullivan, VP of product management for managed services at SunGard Availability Services. “Extending our Oracle management services to virtualized platforms allows customers to leverage the benefits of scale and agility while allowing application managers to focus their time on the core business.”
The Managed Oracle Services support both Oracle database and ERP software.
“As Oracle users prepare for application upgrades from Oracle 11i within the next year, SunGard’s Managed Oracle Services will provide key migration support to organizations so they can more easily transition to R12, all the while providing high application performance, scalability, availability and resiliency,” SunGard said.
On the virtualization side, the service helps clients figure out software licensing, made all the more difficult by running virtual machines on top of a hypervisor.
Tapping SAP Services
Nearly two years ago, SunGard announced cloud support for SAP availability and capacity. “The new service leverages the best in class Vblock cloud platform to provide a production ready cloud infrastructure for SAP ERP and NetWeaver applications, whether a single new development environment or full multi-landscape SAP deployment,” SunGard said at the time of the announcement. Vblock is converged IT infrastructure designed by a partnership of Cisco and EMC.
Pictured: SunGard Data Facility
Bolstering Beantown
As mentioned, SunGard has expanded its data center footprint in Boston by using space in CoreSite Realty Corporation’s network-dense facility.
SunGard made the move since its customer base in New England is growing, especially in retail, IT services, healthcare and finance.
“As our customers' requirements continue to grow and expand, we strive to provide them with best-in-class solutions,” said Jack Dziak, EVP and general manager of SunGard Managed Services. “CoreSite brings premium data center capacity and the diverse network connectivity that our customers across multiple verticals need to rapidly scale their businesses and meet their application performance requirements.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
