CentriLogic has set up a new data center in the Greater Toronto Area which will provide enterprise-grade services and build on experience gained south of the border serving Fortune 500 companies with a 28,000 square foot facility in Mississauga.
Open for business now, it offers managed hosted and co-location services, as well as public/private and hybrid cloud services to both local customers and international ones, said president and CEO Robert Offley, who has a long history in the Canadian data center business.
Offley said CentriLogic’s U.S. business has steadily grown to the point where Fortune 500 companies are outsourcing parts of its IT infrastructure to it. In Canada, the company has been operating in a lower segment of the market, but it’s looking to serve higher-end enterprises as it does in the U.S. and bringing the same products and services to market here, he said.
CentriLogic’s new facility has 7,000 square feet of raised floor space and the plan is to add another 10,000 square feet early next year. It also has hot aisle containment PODS and traditional raised floor configurations that support both low and high power capacity deployments with up to 20 kW per rack available.
While it did look to acquire a facility, Offley said CentrLogic opted to for a brand new efficient facility that can support the mixed, dense environments customers are currently creating that require varying levels of power. It has three other facilities in the GTA, which are still successful and growing, he said, but business south of the border is growing faster. “We see this as a first step to getting a more national presence in Canada.”
One of the concerns enterprises have when it comes to outsourcing to data centers is data residency, said Offley, which is something the company specializes in. “We’ve become very aware of the pitfalls around geopolitical boundaries of data.” CentriLogic also gets demand from U.S. companies to host offerings such SaaS to better service customers here in Canada, he added, as well taking advantage of the low Canadian dollar.
Offley said CentriLogic is looking to offer a range of services to differentiate itself in the Canadian market as part of its efforts to attract larger enterprises. “The goal is to work with Canadian IT departments as technology changes.”
Data residency is one of several important factors for Canadian organizations when selecting a third-party data center, said Mark Schrutt, IDC Canada’s research VP for services and enterprise applications. “A lot of what happens in Canadian data centers is co-location services. Many CIOs want to be out of the data center business.”
There’s a market for new data centers, he said, because existing ones are getting older and some are not up to the task of handling higher power equipment and denser technologies. “There are limitations to current data centers that corporate Canada runs.” Schrutt said.
With the growth of data and the aging of data centers, the market for them has not been cyclical, said Schrutt. Rather, every year there is an increase in organizations that outsourcing their data center requirements, although it has been cyclical in terms of available supply. “We’re not going backwards, we’re only going forwards in terms of third-party hosted services,” he said.
While adequate security and redundancy are among several attributes enterprises see as table stakes when it comes to data centers, Schrutt said there are ways data center companies to differentiate themselves. Location is can be a factor, but so is the ability to offer a customer room to grow, both in terms of space and available power.
CentriLogic is the newest data center to come online, but next month Cogeco will be powering up a new one, said Schrutt. New data centers have all of the bells and whistles, and it’s hard to retrofit older facilities. “The newer ones are modular, so the life cycle is longer than it used to be.”
