SunGard today increased the number of its data centres in Ontario to five with a new disaster recovery and production services-focused facility in Markham. The 1,860 square metre facility has a capacity of 2.5 megawatts.
Building of the facility just 25 minutes north of Toronto’s downtown core was spurred by the growing demand for disaster recovery and managed services in the Greater Toronto Area, according to Joe Sullivan, vice-president of product management at SunGard. Groundbreaking ceremonies took place today, but the facility will officially open in late Q2 or early Q3 of next year.
“In the last four to five year there has been an increase in financial and healthcare organizations looking to store and protect the growing amount of client and patient data they are amassing,” said Sullivan. “Our revenues in this marker has grown by more than 50 per cent since 2010.”
He attributed the growth of two key factors:
- The need for redundancy and high availability of growing amount of data produced by applications and devices
- More firms are looking for managed services to enable the shift in in their use of data to improve business process and enhance decision making
Chris Toushan, country manager of SunGard for Canada, said these demands typically require many businesses to increase budget allocation for data management and storage.
“All of a sudden many businesses find that they have to ramp up their existing data centre facilities which will cost them a lot of money,” he said. “In many cases, the most logical solution for them is to find a data centre provider.”
Apart from being available for disaster recovery and co-location services, Toushan said, SunGard’s new data centre in Markham will also offer managed security, managed storage, managed firewall and managed operating system services.
Aside from the Markham data centre, SunGard has two existing production services facilities and two recovery services in Mississauga, Ont.
The company also has facilities in Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal and Quebec City.