In August 2021 85mm.ca moved from our long time home at Zenfolio to our new home with the help of myDMDi Technology and Design. It has been a year long migration that involved a lot of new hardware, process re-designs and uncertainty with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing back our production timeline. However, we made the August 2021 go life date with some long hours behind the scenes.

Along with a new website design, we have a new backend systems. This includes high performance datastore backed by the ZFS filing system. We transitioned to ZFS years ago, but now we have brand new drives and more virtual storage devices. We are fully hosted on a ZFS high performance Network Attached Storage (NAS). All data is again hosted on Enterprise SAS drives and Enterprise class hardware with monitoring, backups and self healing capabilities.

Only the very best drives that can meet exact specifications for performance, duty cycles, Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and HDD rotational vibration necessary for an enterprise-level environment are accepted for customer usage. – Dell & Dell HCI

We rebuilt our arrays with the ZFS filing system as suggested by our consultants over at myDMDi. Our arrays are setup as RAID-Z2 virtual devices. RAID-Z2 is more fault-tolerant, as it uses two parity blocks and two data blocks of each piece of data. RAID-Z2 is an analogue to a RAID 6 array, and can withstand the loss of two disks in the array.

With our new RAID-Z2 array, if any data blocks fails an integrity check, ZFS can independently reconstruct the data from one of the two parity blocks. This provides us with exception data integrity and piece of mind.

One of the biggest reasons we moved away from Zenfolio was our new services. We expanded a lot over the last three years and needed a better way to promote our service offerings. 

Better integration with cloud services, new technologies and Web3 applications, meant we had to find a new home if we were going to expand and keep our customer happy.

One of the huge service changes come with our new print studio.  We have enhanced the our print certification and proof of authenticity. We now integrate Near Field Communication (NFC), into our prints, meaning anyone with an NFC capable smartphone or reader can get enhanced information about the prints they are looking at.

NFTs are the next step in ownership and residual sales revenue for our market space. We wanted to make sure we could provide these new service to our customers. For that we built our own infrastructure to support this new initiative over at the 85mm.ca Exchange. We are still working hard to complete the companion Tokens, but our NFT workflow should be available by the end of 2021.