Like most modern retailers, Brault & Martineau relies on a growing e-commerce website to drive sales. Site availability is critical for the company because 100,000 customers use the site each week to find and purchase a range of furniture for delivery or in-store pickup. “Our e-commerce site needs to be available 24/7, with no downtime,” says Jean-François Charette, the company’s infrastructure and integration manager. “Customers could be buying furniture at midnight or in the middle of the day, and we need to accommodate them.”

Ensuring high availability had become challenging on the company’s existing e-commerce platform, hosted on IBM SoftLayer. “We had quite a few issues with system availability,” says Martin Boissy, the company’s general manager of IT. “We saw platform downtime every few months, and we weren’t told what the problem was. We spent a lot of time fixing issues and our online business was affected.” For example, SoftLayer imposed frequent service-impacting maintenance on large groups of servers, which resulted in multiple hours of downtime for Brault & Martineau several times a year. These incidents were often announced only a few days in advance, so the Brault & Martineau team did not have enough time to plan for them. “This happened recently, when our production servers were shut down for four hours, forcing our teams to work all night to protect our data and restore service,” says Charette.

The e-commerce site was growing by 20 percent annually, so Brault & Martineau urgently needed to address the problem. “Because of our fast growth, we needed a new platform that was very scalable and easy to manage,” says Charette.