London School of Economics outsources disaster recovery

The LSE wants to ensure full availability of data

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has signed a five-year deal with SunGard for the provision of business continuity services.

Under the agreement, which will come into force by the end of 2008, the university will use two facilities managed by SunGard in West London and Docklands, as well as its software, to backup and recover 40TB of critical systems and data currently held on 97 servers.

The deal also includes the implementation of a new email archiving platform and a reprioritisation of the LSE's recovery strategies to store and backup data more efficiently.

"As with most organisations, our data is very much our crown jewels so it was imperative that we found the right partner to help protect and ensure 24/7 availability of our critical systems," said Adrian Ellison, assistant director in IT services at the LSE.

"The events of 7/7 brought home to us the importance of having alternative backup sites away from our campus in central London. We are now very much leading the way among our peers by adopting an outsourced and multi-location approach to data recovery and email availability."