Smart Camp: Building Scalable and Highly Available IT-Infrastructures

Abstract

The Western Australian resources boom has created a demand for a large amount of domestic accommodations, known as mining camps. However, due to the absent infrastructure within the remote regions of Australia, the energy supply of these mining camps is expensive. In order to reduce the electricity consumption of the mining camps, the Smart Camp project was initiated. The system infrastructure consists of a home automation based controller, placed in each mining accommodation unit to reduce energy consumption, and a centralized management unit, coordinating the controllers. Due to the fact that the size and complexity of mining camps may grow over time, the provided infrastructure of the management unit has to be able to evolve. One possible solution is to design a system in the context of high availability and horizontal scalability. This paper proposes a horizontally scalable and high availability infrastructural concept, in the context of the Smart Camp project. This concept also utilizes cost effective open source solutions running on commodity hardware. Within the context of horizontal scalability and reliability, this paper provides an applied research outline of some of the real world considerations, such as open source based high availability, load balancing, and distributed database solutions.