SunGard offers better data recovery times

New electronic vaulting service sends data backups to two separate data centres

Business continuity vendor SunGard Availability Services has unveiled its new Electronic Vaulting service, which aims to help firms recover from system outages in a timely manner.

Electronic Vaulting makes use of both disk and tape storage. The service sends daily data backups over SunGard's network to two separate data centres, one using disk storage, the other tape.

SunGard's product and solutions director, Dave Gilpin, said that as customers using the service would not need to back up to tape themselves, this would reduce the time and risk involved with both backing up the data and restoring it if an outage occurs.

"As tapes have to be physically taken off the premises at back up, it follows that recovery cannot happen until the tapes are brought back again, and this is where the risks lie,” Gilpin warned. “If disaster strikes or your offices are for some reason inaccessible you may be helpless.”

In related news, Symantec updated its data and application availability package specifically for Windows environments. Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 High Availability for Windows is a combination of Storage Foundation for Windows and the Veritas Cluster Server.

The new software includes extra tools to simplify management of firms’ critical applications, for example Exchange and SQL Server, said Symantec. Automated discovery and management of IP-based SANs and new configuration wizards have also been added, which the security firm said could improve storage, cluster and replication install times by over 50 percent.