Independent data centres in Canada are almost growing as fast as weeds.
The latest being developed is by Savvis, a U.S.-based company that owns 55 data centres around the world including three here from its 2010 purchase of Fusepoint Inc.
The fourth structure will be in the Toronto suburb of Markham, Ont., Ash Mathur, vice-president and country manager for Savvis Canada, said Monday.
At 100,000 square feet, it will roughly double the combine size of the company’s data centres in Montreal, Mississauga, Ont. and Vancouver. It is scheduled to open next summer and will be an Uptime Institute-certified Tier III facility.
“We see a lot of demand for infrastructure as a service, for managed services, for co-location and cloud-based services,” Mathur said.
In addition, it meets the needs of a large number of Canadian organizations that insist that for any outsourced service corporate data reside in this country
The new data centre will connect to multiple carriers, and be rated for handling a maximum of 5 megawatts of IT load when full. The first phase, though, it will be a 2 mW facility.
The new centre, which will employ five to seven people, is being converted from what had been a distribution warehouse.
Savvis offers organizations a wide range of services, some tailored to specific verticals (financial, retail, healthcare and media companies). It also offers the usual list of data centre services — everything from private cloud, hosted Microsoft Exchange/SAP/Hadoop to managed security.
Mathur became country manager in June. He had been a consultant, and before that vice-president of sales at Cisco Systems Canada.
Owned by Internet service provider CenturyLink Inc. stemming from a 2011 merger, Savvis will change its name to CenturyLink Technology Solutions on Jan. 21, 2014.
