While information-recovery awareness is high among companies, Tapper says IT executives don't lay out much money for the necessary infrastructure such as servers, storage, and software. The largest companies spend around 5% of their total IT budgets on information recovery, but most businesses only spend half a percent, he says.
One loyal SunGard customer is poised to renegotiate the terms of its disaster-recovery service. Schneider National Inc., a logistics and trucking company, is adding servers, storage, and software to its dual data center. For more than five years, Schneider has used shared space at one of SunGard's 35 megacenters for multiple disaster-recovery tests each year. "But we've never found it necessary to declare a disaster," says Paul Miller, VP of technology services at Schneider. The trucking company already distinguishes disaster recovery from business continuity, which it considers a business process that echoes throughout the organization. A business-impact analysis that Schneider conducted last year, including the history of class 4 and 5 tornados in the Green Bay, Wis., area, provided justification for a balanced load between dual data centers. "Our SunGard relationship will continue as we implement the second center," Miller says. "Our contract runs beyond next year, but it's uncertain what our ongoing SunGard relationship will be like."
SunGard already provides multiple levels of service to customers. Most use SunGard sites for recovery in times of trouble, be it fires in Southern California, a hurricane pummeling the East Coast, or a blackout knocking out much of the country. At the New York-area megacenter, dual 12,000-gallon diesel generators left a smell in the air but sat quietly. During August's blackout, Guddemi says, they kept the center running for 96 hours.
Many customers get a secure room in one of SunGard's centers for an application or two, and a handful keep their whole back ends at a center. SunGard gives everyone a big fat pipe, all the infrastructure they can handle, and nonstop technical support from SunGard engineers at every center. "A customer's own data center costs a lot more, they have a hard time delivering two, three, or four hours of recovery time, and that leads to more lost revenue," Guddemi says.
SunGard is consolidating five disaster-recovery centers into one at its New York metro area megacenter, which already has more than 3,000 square feet in support of Unix and Windows infrastructures and another 23,000 square feet ready on the second floor for mainframe infrastructure soon to move in.
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