The new 46MW facility is located on the site of the former Toronto Star printing plant at One Century Place in Vaughan, Ontario, which was once the largest newspaper facility in Canada for more than 25 years.
“Toronto is home to a booming financial services industry and a burgeoning roster of large technology companies and emerging tech startups for whom digital transformation is driving enterprise initiatives,” said William Stein, CEO of Digital Realty.
Toronto is Canada’s financial and business capital and one of the leading technology clusters in North America with more than 15,000 technology companies along the Toronto to Waterloo corridor, making the new colocation space best placed to meet this demand.
“We are seeing strong demand for data centre expansion in Toronto, with a rapidly growing need for safe, reliable provisioning of IT services and capabilities. We are very excited to be converting the iconic Toronto Star building into a revolutionary new data centre, ideal for cloud providers, financial services companies and enterprises of all sizes. The grand opening is another important milestone in achieving our strategic goal of building an unparalleled global network of top-tier data centres in major cities and interconnection hubs around the world.”
The new Toronto site has been engineered to deliver a PUE of 1.25 annualised at full capacity and features 23 computer rooms ranging from 800 to 1,200 sqm (8,600 to 13,000 sqft) accommodating power capacities from 1 to 3MW per room. Resiliencies at the facility range from n to 2n with a power density range of 1,000 to more than 4,000W per sqm (100 to 300W per sqft).
“We are extremely pleased Digital Realty has been able to re-purpose such a historic site and are delighted they have been able to bring it into the digital transformation era while retaining its aesthetic appeal,” said Brett Miller, CEO at JLL Canada. “This facility will serve the community well as a strong addition to the Greater Toronto Area’s data and technology infrastructure, which is increasingly under-resourced due to the rapid growth of business in this region.”
Additionally. Digital Realty’s open platform allows customers to implement their data centere strategies, with a comprehensive selection of service providers, levels of redundancy, power configurations, and connectivity options. The facility has also been strategically located adjacent to a utility sub-station, giving it direct access to low-cost power, as well as close proximity to downtown Toronto, major highways, and an international airport making for easy accessibility.
“This new facility will empower our customers to successfully tackle their unique digital transformation objectives with agile data centre solutions built for growth and harnessing the power of proximity needed for latency-sensitive applications. The layout and scale of the Toronto Star plant allowed us to tailor options for customers based on budget, security, and redundancy needs, and there is simply nothing else like it on the market. The new Toronto data centre helps customers remove some of the complexity of cloud migration by offering flexibility in secure multi-cloud connectivity options and offering self-provisioned bandwidth-on-demand,” added Erich Sanchack, Digital Realty’s executive vice president of operations.