This video covers high availability for building maintenance and security, featuring Harry Aujla, technical director at SIOS. Building Management System (BMS) solutions are software-based solutions running on hardware, designed and built with varying degrees of autonomy and intelligence. BMS can either be hosted on-site or off-site at a geographically distant control center.
The BMS sector is at the cusp of another technical evolution as its customers are looking at how the cloud is changing the operating landscape. The market is now sufficiently mature in that many of the cloud vendors now offer secure and redundant connections to their platforms. There’s an implicit trust that BMS related data is being securely transmitted to and from the cloud. A lot of BMS companies are running in the cloud as well.
To define your SLSs before customers embark on a high availability project is important. If we have an instance running in the cloud where our BMS solution is running and this instance for whatever reason happens to fail, the cloud vendors will take necessary actions to recover the instance. But what happens if you suffer an application software issue within the cloud instance? You need a way of monitoring application level failures and orchestrating their recovery. It’s important to consider adding a high availability clustering solution like SIOS that can address the application level high availability needs which can then contribute towards maintaining application performance.