Saturday 5 July 2008

Matchpeg has a new Disaster Recovery site

Matchpeg has a new Disaster Recovery site: we have moved over to Flexiscale's cloud-computing platform, largely because it makes our DR superbly eco-friendly.

Like alternatives such as Amazon EC2, Flexiscale makes it possible for us to start the DR servers automatically, transfer the latest customer data onto them, and then shut the servers down again. Instead of consuming electricity 365x24x7, the servers only run for minutes per day.

(Yes, strictly speaking, Flexiscale's very big iron is still running all the time even when our virtual servers aren't, but there's nevertheless a major reduction in energy consumption.)

We obviously hope that we'll never actually have occasion to use these DR servers. However, we're convinced that cloud-computing platforms are the way forwards, and we expect that the Matchpeg live site will also be running on something similar in the not-too-distant future. (Though we can't have both our live and DR servers at Flexiscale - they obviously need to be in separate physical locations).