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The Daily T1R
– May 10, 2007
By Dan Golding
T1R recently took the train to Philadelphia, in order to check out Sungard's presence in the 410 Broad Street carrier hotel. In a secondary telecom market like Philadelphia, the entirety of the building is sparsely needed for interconnection and carrier points of presence (POPs). Accordingly, Sungard has taken over a huge section of the building, including the mezzanine and the top six floors. The entire Sungard facility has 650k raised floor square feet – the largest disaster recovery facility that T1R is aware of on the East Coast of the US.
That space is utilized in a few different ways. One floor is set aside for Sungard's rather stealthy managed hosting practice, which differs from Sungard's larger disaster recovery (DR) product line. Their DR services are designed to purely provide backup – be it for mainframes, midrange systems, conventional servers, storage, or anything else. The Sungard managed hosting offering is predicated on a revolutionary idea for Sungard – managing the primary system. In addition to DR and managed hosting footprints, the facility features a large number of control rooms – essentially, outsourced network and system operations centers for Sungard customers. This is a smart move, as it leverages real estate assets without taxing power or cooling. Sungard has dozens of those control centers, each leased in a timeshare arrangement to various enterprises.
Sungard also provides a variety of other services in the facility – including cavernously empty call centers (waiting for a disaster to displace call center workers), and several backup trading floors – a short train ride from New York City. CyrusOne provides a similar service to their energy company customers, which have backup trading desks on the second floor of the primary CyrusOne datacenter. This is a great use for unused or unusable space in a datacenter. Sungard also maintains what might be called "emergency colo" – open datacenter space for transplanted servers and routers from displaced datacenters.
One of the most fascinating elements of T1R's time at the Sungard facility was the references to Hurricane Katrina. Like other shared tenant datacenter providers, Sungard used the lessons learned from Katrina to raise the level of their operations in order to be ready for the next big 'event,' whatever that will be. While T1R can't imagine that any datacenter provider hasn't run that sort of 'what-if' exercise, it's better late than never for those who have yet to follow Sungard's lead.
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