IBM has partnered with the Governments of Canada and Ontario and the City of Barrie to build a new computing facility, the IBM Canada Leadership Data Centre.
The new data centre uses advanced modular and green design for maximum efficiency to help organisations manage growth while reducing costs and securely mitigating risk, the company said.
The 25,000ft² facility will allow the company to provide advanced data storage space, security and disaster recovery services.
The $90m centre will offer ‘cloud’ computing capabilities to support research initiatives at the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre.
IBM Canada president John Lutz said: "This new facility provides a flexible foundation ingrained in best-practices so we can deliver essential services to help organizations and partners better manage data, reduce operating costs, improve productivity and gain competitive advantage."
Modular data centre design uses small increments of standardised components to match business requirements with IT requirements and only add data centre capacity when needed.
They can be expanded in half the time of a traditional data centre to accommodate growing demand and also help clients save up to 30% energy costs per year compared to traditional centres.
The new facility will provide 25,000 square feet of initial capacity with option to extend it to 100,000 square feet. It will provide synchronous replication of data with another centre 100km apart ensuring reliability of data recovery and immunity from disaster.
