The OVH Montreal data center is the company's first in North America, and will have the capacity to host 360,000 physical servers
France-based dedicated and cloud hosting provider OVH announced this week that it is expanding its footprint into North America with a new “green” data center in Montreal, Canada, which the company says has the capacity for 360,000 physical servers.
The facility, which began providing services to customers in North America this week, has been in the works for more than a year. The news of the European hosting giant’s plan first arose in December of 2011, when OVH first said it would build a data center in Montreal.
Big Get Bigger – OVH Montreal Data Center a Huge Capacity Boost
The massive new North American facility is a big increase in capacity for the already-huge French hosting company, which says it currently manages about 140,000 servers throughout Europe. According to the announcement, OVH is planning to bring the same characteristics with which it competes for European server business to the North American market.
“We set our standards very high and our prices are competitive,” says Octave Klaba, OVH’s founder and CEO, quoted in the press release announcing the new facility. “We expect to meet North American user’s needs as we do in Europe.”
Along with the familiar dedicated server offering, the company’s website describes a “dedicated cloud” service that is currently in testing, and a public cloud product that is “coming soon.”
According to the outline on its North American website, one of those competitive characteristics is the company’s aggressive pricing on low-cost server hosting. OVH’s dedicated server packages start at $39 per month for a dual-core Intel i3 2130 server with 8GB of RAM, 2TB of storage and 5TB of monthly traffic. And server configurations and prices increase in fairly small increments from there.
New OVH Montreal Data Center Using Proprietary “Green” Tech
The facility itself, known as “BHS,” is the result of a significant environmental effort by OVH. Located just outside Montreal, the facility is situated just 300 meters from a hydro-electric dam, enabling the facility to run entirely off renewable power. OVH says the data center uses proprietary cooling technologies developed in-house to run without air conditioning, at a power usage effectiveness of less than 1.1.
Less than 1.1 is a remarkable score for PUE, which measures the amount of overall power being consumed by the facility versus the amount of power being used just to power the computers inside. A PUE of 1.0 would be a “perfect,” though more or less unattainable, score. A 1.2 is considered a “very good” rating.
In a Data Center Knowledge story around the time the data center first started, Rich Miller wrote that the OVH Montreal data center was a former aluminum manufacturing plant, the design of which enabled some of the environmental features. Read more: “European Giant OVH to Enter US Hosting Market”
Along with the green facility design and the substantial capacity, OVH says the facility will provide access to the company’s in-house fiber optic network, which OVH says is one of the world’s largest networks, with 33 points of presence, and reach into every continent.
Talk back: Do you feel like the OVH Montreal data center, and the services offered from it, have the potential to disrupt the dedicated server business in the US? Are you likely to look at OVH’s North American services from the perspective of a customer or a competitor? Let us know in the comments.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
