Reclaim Valuable Storage Capacity With Sungard Availability Services' Storage Optimization Service

Wayne, Pa., July 7, 2009 -- In today's business environment, organizations face two competing data storage challenges.  Tightening budgets are forcing many companies to scale back IT spending, but at the same time, data growth continues to increase exponentially increasing pressure to invest in more storage capacity.  According to Forrester Research, storage represents at least 11 percent or more of IT hardware budgets*.  These growing storage needs are largely due to transactional systems, data warehouses and rapidly growing e-mail traffic.  

With the goal of a proactive and efficient data center in mind, SunGard Availability Services' consulting practice has developed a five-step storage optimization service that helps organizations reclaim valuable storage capacity while meeting their information availability goals.

Clean up the noise.  During this initial step, SunGard's storage consultants work closely with the organization to monitor both server to storage and storage to server communications.  During this four to six week process, organizations can expect to find capacity that is undetected, underutilized or unmanaged - otherwise known as "wasted space."

Tier the data.  The second step focuses on achieving an operationally efficient and fiscally optimized infrastructure.  During this step, both applications and data sets are classified based on the following three questions: what are the files; how old are they; and when were they last accessed.  By asking these questions as well as conducting interviews with business and IT management, SunGard's consultants can recommend tiered strategies that align business need with availability and performance.

Secure and optimized.  During third step, SunGard will identify how an organization can implement a centralized, policy-based infrastructure and manage the information based on its actual business value.  SunGard will then provide recommendations to help the organization shrink its backup windows while speeding up restore processes.Clean and compliant.  The fourth step involves developing a data retention strategy as well as an equally important data disposal policy.  During this time, organizations will address key questions, including: how long should data be kept; when should data be thrown away; and how fast must data be accessible.  Additionally, SunGard will help the organization couple its regulatory requirements with a roadmap for migration of the inactive data from higher-cost storage to readily accessible, more reasonably priced storage units.

Healthy and tested.  Lastly, SunGard's consultants will work to establish an environment that uses repeatable processes, a common language between business and technology and well-defined policies.  Step five focuses on the development and maintenance of a higher level of organizational maturity that will stay current with evolving business requirements and remain sustainable over time.

By offering a vendor-neutral approach, SunGard's storage optimization service focuses on helping customers get more out of their organization's existing storage capabilities, rather than buying additional storage hardware.  Additionally, the service helps them build efficient and compliant storage infrastructures to support regulatory requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.  

"By working with SunGard through this storage optimization process, organizations can pinpoint their actual storage capacity, allocation and usage -- helping to reduce OPEX and CAPEX spending," said Bill Stith, senior director, storage consulting at SunGard Availability Services.  "Our methodologies help organizations align IT operations with their business and information availability goals."

SunGard Availability Services' consulting services range from storage optimization services to design, implementation and maintenance to address availability, security, compliance and IT efficiency.  SunGard provides a tested and proven approach to information availability which integrates over 30 years of industry experience that has been refined through hundreds of applications.About SunGard Availability Services
SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software to more than 10,000 customers in North America and Europe.  With five million square feet of datacenter and operations space, SunGard assists IT organizations across virtually all industry and government sectors prepare for and recover from emergencies by helping them minimize their computer downtime and optimize their uptime. Through direct sales and channel partners, we help organizations ensure their people and customers have uninterrupted access to the information systems they need in order to do business. To learn more, visit www.availability.sungard.com or call 1-800-468-7483.
About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world's leading software and IT services companies.  SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries, including the world's 25 largest financial services companies.
SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.
With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor**, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented five times.  For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.
* Forrester Research, Inc. "Five Key Storage Strategies for a Down Economy" by Andrew Reichman (with Stephanie Balaouras, Rachel A. Dines, and Rachel Batiancila), July 16, 2008.
**January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

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