CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
As far as I know, data availability is huge for some. Round Trip Time is pretty important in some circumstances.
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Calgary & Alberta Economy
- Thread starter Oddball
- Start date
darwink
Senior Member
When I was working with a group thinking of building its own cloud service to service its and others needs, proximity was viewed as ideal for providing service near to or equal to having onsite compute given that the cycle consumers could choose either way.
For AB vs other provinces, no sales tax really helps on these I think? I'd have to read some tax bulletins to be sure.
HudsonA08
New Member
Also, location could be important with data privacy concerns. For example, can health data be stored on moved between servers outside the province or country?
Whether cloud or traditional private cage hosting etc.. physical distance does make a difference. I've been involved in various projects involving orgs in Calgary using Azure (located in Toronto and Quebec city), and often it's too slow for many apps. Some pilots have been tested and scrapped immediately, like within a few days because the performance is so noticeably degraded. Some apps work okay if instant responses aren't needed.
Ideally you'd want the data centre to be in Calgary, but anywhere within 1000km would probably work for most apps, which is great for Calgary becuase geographically it can cover all of western Canada quite easily.
Having data centres here in Calgary is a nice advantage to have, as it could factor in a company's decision for re-location or regional HO, etc.. If you have apps that need less than 10ms RTT, you'll need the data centre to be close. Data hosted here in Calgary would give you about 2-5ms RTT, and for users in Edm, probably about 5-10ms, Van about 8-15ms, etc.. The speed of light calculation is usually about 1ms delay , per 100km, and it will very of course, but bottom line, the closer the better. Same city is almost like having your data on premise.
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This is a thing for sure. The org I work for requires all data to reside in Canada. I don't know about provincial geo restrictions, but as you mentioned I could see it with provincial government, health, etc..
Alberta health had been using data centres here in Calgary, and maybe it's because of geo restrictions?
Rollerstud98
Active Member
Both locations, now everything is just in Balzac though. I have not worked on either site though.
Interesting. I wonder why they moved everything to Balzac? the SE location wasn't that old. It wasn't built by eStruxtures, maybe they wanted to build their own from scratch.
darwink
Senior Member
If most of the 'fixed' capital is mobile, moving to a lower tax location can be pretty appealing.
AJX
Active Member
Cloud technology itself wouldn’t drive tech companies here any more than other data hosting but as SP mentioned it’s more about the geographical location in general for hosting of any type.
The colder winter weather unfortunately doesn’t factor in as much as expected. Cooler winters and summers would require less air conditioning to cool it down but it’s not as much as people expect.
The reason Calgary has a lot of data centre build is originally from all the head offices. Once the infrastructure was built it helped attract companies from other cities to move their data here.
Rollerstud98
Active Member
As far as I know we installed new cooling equipment at the se location and it is still operational.
I misread the post. I took it as they moved out of the SE and that everything was only in Balzac now.
jianxia15
Active Member
'A major reset': Alberta government dismisses AIMCo board and CEO, citing underperformance
The Alberta government has dismissed the CEO and board at AIMCo, citing displeasure with increasingly high costs.
calgaryherald.com
trtcttc
Active Member
'A major reset': Alberta government dismisses AIMCo board and CEO, citing underperformance
The Alberta government has dismissed the CEO and board at AIMCo, citing displeasure with increasingly high costs.
Alberta appoints Ray Gilmour as interim CEO of AIMCo
The provincial government has announced the new chief executive officer of the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) following Thursday's firing of the agency’s entire board of directors.
Assuming he's just the interim CEO while they appoint a new board and search for a full-time CEO. I really hope they don't take AIMCo down the Caisse route, increasing the pension's risk instead of diversifying it. I do think pensions should have a venture capital arms that invests locally (small amount of money relatively speaking), while keeping the big money away from local large corporations looking for bailouts for "jobs"
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
Just cannot trust them to not do something partisan. These are people's pensions that they and their employer have paid into, this is not some play thing.
trtcttc
Active Member
The performance issues at AIMCo has been well documented though. The 2020 drop was completely apolitical and led to organizations wanting to pull out (AIMCo is the investment arm on behalf of many public pensions). Arguably the previous CEO was investing in the business so they can become a competitor to the OTPP, OMERS, BCIMC. But that's not the only operating model and definitely most of these active pensions (except maybe OTPP) have underperformed indices.