By Damon Van Der Linde Financial Post
Vidéotron opening data hosting centre in Montreal for business clients who want to store information in Quebec
MONTREAL — Vidéotron has announced it will build a $40-million data-hosting centre in Montreal, saying it hopes to meet the needs of its 120,000 Quebec business clients who want to store their information in the province.
“Some people like to be close by. They want to have access to their servers physically,” said Vidéotron CEO Manon Brouillette in an interview following the ground breaking for the construction on Wednesday.
“Our customers have been asking for this type of service so it was a secure bet.”
The Québecor Media Inc. subsidiary’s data centre will have an available load of 16 megawatts and will be Tier 3 certified, meaning it has multiple power and cooling paths that an expected 99.982 per cent availability, second only to Tier 4 certification.
Last March Vidéotron Business Services acquired Quebec City’s largest data centre, 4Degrees, for $36 million and recently announced it would expand the facility.
The Montreal data centre will be linked to 4Degrees through Vidéotron’s fibre optic network which the company says makes it the with in Quebec equipped to offer Tier 3 intraprovincial redundancy.