SunGard Availability Services is to spend $50 million on improving its New York disaster recovery facilities to better accommodate financial industry contingency planning demands.
SunGard says that it will be expanding its MegaCenter in Carlstadt, New Jersey by 30% with the development of a new 100,000 square foot facility. The expanded facility will support more than 1000 end-user recovery positions, 2000 square feet dedicated to high availability services and secure infrastructure including fully furnished offices, pre-wired redundant telecommunications, uninterruptible power supply units and 24-hour security monitoring.
Jim Simmons, chief executive officer of SunGard Availability Services comments: "Following the events of September 11, the Carlstadt facility supported 47 disaster declarations, many of which were from SunGard’s financial services clients in the Lower Manhattan area. This new facility gives our customers more options for work group recovery and high availability services that will enable them to attain a higher level of information availability."
SunGard anticipates spending $27 million in capital improvements and another $27 million in long term lease payments. Construction is slated to begin in October, with completion expected in the second quarter of 2003.
SunGard currently operates over 3 million square feet of hardened data centre facilities worldwide, of which 600,000 square feet are in the New York metro area.