There has been major activity in this field with the Amazon data centre announced, expansion of data hive as posted earlier in the thread, and now this one. Calgary must be right up there ad a data centre hub. Maybe the Data centre capital of Western Canada?
Calgary is right up there. It's by far the data centre hub of the prairies and is closing in on Vancouver.
Most data centers run constantly at fairly close to their max consumption. Their whole value proposition is built on pooling loads from different customers to maximize asset utilization.
For regular data centres, usually that's the case, with cloud services the power model is different. Many companies have stuff in the cloud that only gets used as an overflow site at varying times, or as a backup/tertiary site. Some companies have apps that sit in the cloud and are asleep (using very little electricity) a good chunk of the year and only woken up a few times a year for things like DR tests, and updates, etc... A lot of companies have their apps spread out, so that different time zones will hit different data centres at different times of the day.
Most of the new data centre activity is geared toward cloud hosting, so it'll interesting to see how the power consumption shakes out.
Apparently, it’s the data centre hub of Alberta at least, as the article mentions 12 data centres in Calgary and 9 in Edmonton.
Calgary is the hub for the prairies and arguably for western Canada, or at least is on the trajectory to be the western Canada hub. The article has some incorrect or misleading info in it, for example, Edmonton is actually 7 data centres as a couple of data centres are sharing the same facility (Rogers and Wolfpaw). Edmonton's data centres are also much smaller and not the enterprise scale ones we see here and 3 of them barely qualify as a data centre. Calgary's has 13 data centres compared to Edmonton's 7, but the real comparison is in leasable whitespace. Here are some of the numbers for western Canada.
Vancouver ~380,000sqft
Calgary: ~350,000sqft
Edmonton ~40,000sqft
Winnipeg ~12,000sqft
I'm going to look into Vancouver numbers as they may have changed. The Calgary numbers include one of the AWS cloud centres, which might not be online quite yet. There are still 3 good sized data centres coming afterthe first AS centre; the second AWS cloud centre, the new eStruxture centre which will be huge (~160,000 sqft of whitespace), also the coming addition of Datahive DH2. DH2 will probably have about 6-7,000sqft of white space. Not huge, but still a nice boost for downtown.
One last note. Private data centres such as oil companies, ISPs, governments, etc.. aren't in the list. There's no growth in private data centres anyway, but wanted to mention it.
In our electricity market, a user that doesn't need 24/7 uptime (like a cloud business for example) can make a lot of money timing their demand. They can also build storage behind the plant gate to increase how many hours they want to play in the market.
Yep.
calgaryherald.com
