With a focus on enhancing the level of redundancy in our systems we are taking the fist step in building out our Kelowna cluster. A key part of our enterprise risk management plan is having our systems geographically distributed.   Our first node in Kelowna supports redundant operations of some of our e-commerce and logistics solutions.  

For a long time we were dependent on backups to data centres in eastern Canada and the ability to spin up machines on public cloud infrastructure.  A strategy commonly used today by many software providers.  However, our analysis found the Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) far to long.  We are building out a network of regional clusters running our software solutions.  Our goal is to have burpless failover between the various data centres in a highly resilient structure.  Kelowna complements our much larger install in Victoria and backup systems we have in Toronto and Montreal.

You may wonder why we run on our own private cloud instead of using public cloud infrastructure such as Amazon.  It is a strategic decision, many of our customer are in retail and are reassured knowing exactly where there is located and managed.  This provides a level of reassurance that we know exactly where their data is stored.  We also frequently have quite specialised networking needs that are difficult to achieve with a public cloud