Sungard says the upgrade of its South Bank and Docklands centres reflect customer demands for recovery facilities away from existing offices but within the area.

Shared and dedicated positions at its South Bank recovery centre will rise to 1800 within two buildings as a result, increasing the total number of available workplace recovery seats in central London by more than 1000.

Keith Tilley, managing director of SunGard Availability Services UK, says the centres will benefit clients who require high availability services and extremely resilient networks.

He adds that ScaleNet - a high bandwidth metropolitan area network (MAN) that links the vendor's campuses and technology centre - will be a key part of the offering, especially as the level of potential risk has increased in the last year.

The investment is in addition to a £15 million upgrade of data centre facilities at SunGard's London technology centre in Hounslow. A full investment programme is being carried out across the rest of the vendor's data and recovery centres in the UK.

In the US, SunGard has just completed a $40 million expansion project to increase the infrastructure available to its subscribers in hardened MegaCenters in Philadelphia, Pa., North Bergen, N.J., and Chicago, Ill.

This latest expansion includes an investment in IBM 64-bit mainframe zSeries Servers that increases by 45% SunGard’s testable MIPS. SunGard has also increased IBM Ficon Express channel capacity, allowing subscribers to connect from any zSeries mainframe to various tape and disk peripherals, as well as new Ficon disk technologies.

With Ficon Express connectivity, subscribers can restore their data up to four times faster than using Escon channels.