CDN’s Newsmaker issue for 2016 was an easy one: Data Centres. There were so many data centre openings in 2016 highlighted by the two from Microsoft Canada and the first AWS region outside of the U.S. in Montreal. What these data centres did was put to bed the issue of data sovereignty in this country for channel partners.
Data centres in Canada are growing rapidly. At present there is more than 5,000 data centres of which 200 are brand new, high-end commercial-grade facilities. An additional million square feet of data centre and co-location space is in the planning stages, according to JLL, a Chicago-based professional services and investment management firm specializing in data centres.
JLL research found an unprecedented movement of data from private corporate servers to cloud-based solutions, and a growing thirst for Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, are pushing corporate demand. With data consumption skyrocketing, some major cloud providers are anticipating the need to triple their infrastructure by 2020.
Besides the major ones from Microsoft and AWS Canada, there were others such as Internet services provider OVH of Roubaix, France who turned the former Rio Tinto Alcan aluminum plant located in the Montreal suburb of Beauharnois into one of the world’s largest data centres.
Nine months after rebranding itself Forcepoint, the security vendor established deep roots in Canada with the opening of a state-of-the-art data centre in Toronto to further its security objectives.
In August, disaster recovery company Datto Inc., not the biggest household name in Canada, made a large investment in Canada with a new data centre.
And, for all indications this data centre trend will continue into 2017.