Bordeaux Developments is a Canadian employee-owned land development company based in Calgary, Alberta. Our parent company, Bordeaux Properties, also operates our affiliated residential homebuilding company, Baywest Homes, which are known as the “Red-Pen Builders.” We provide a standard home plan and our clients are given a great degree of freedom to mark up the plans to modify and customize their luxury home. They can move walls or add square footage.
We are actively working with our development team to provide cutting-edge residential fibre optic communications technology in and to our homes at Bordeaux’s new Harmony development in the municipal district of Rocky View, just outside Calgary. Our goal is to provide world-class IT infrastructure that is robust, reliable, flexible and scalable and systems to support the business.
A significant challenge that we have overcome is that initially we had our server and other IT equipment on site without the right kind of power and air conditioning to keep them operational 24/7. As we added more IT equipment, the temperature in the room rose. As well, the building we’re in turned the power off at night and on weekends.
Working with our Dell sales representative, we decided to decommission our on-site server room, which significantly improved our ability to support our backend infrastructure. We moved our servers to a colocated hosting facility to minimize our footprint and power requirements and ensure redundant power and cooling and added security. As part of the process, we increased our technological capacity by moving to the Dell EqualLogic storage system, which took us about 20 minutes online with a Dell technician to get up and running. This was just painless and dead easy. Normally it would take a 15-hour day to implement a project like this. It really has simplified our life. Implementing Microsoft’s Distributed File Replication System lessened bandwidth between the office and the collocation facility as an issue. VMware virtualization reduced our physical server count thereby reducing our power and A/C needs.
Products used in Solutions:
Primary storage: Dell EqualLogic, Product Rating: 5/5, thumb up
Data management: Dell PowerEdge server. Product Rating: 5/5, thumb up
Security: Watchguard. Product Rating: 4/5, thumb up
VMware: Virtualization solution for services. Product Rating: 5/5, thumb up
Oracle: We use Oracle for our ERP. Product Rating: 3/5, thumb up
Our mantra is: ‘Do more with less.’ And we see technology as a way to do that. A way to spend less time transposing information or tracking down paper documents when they could be found online.