New OVH North American DC

[sv01]

http://www.ovh.com/us/a1542.ovh-bhs-datacenter-it-quebec-canada

The construction of BHS, the Canadian datacenter of OVH.com, just entered its third phase. A new hosting space of a capacity of 10,000 servers will soon be open for business. This expansion is more than necessary, as 50,000 North American clients already trust the third Internet hosting provider worldwide, less than 2 years after the beginning of its operations in Canada.

The first thing one notices when visiting the construction site is that the new hosting spaces will now be containers and not towers anymore. The location, previously owned by the company Rio Tinto Alcan, an aluminum smelter, covers a large area, thus providing enough space to build horizontally shaped spaces. “We optimize our performances by deploying our infrastructure faster, while giving our teams the opportunity to have a better reactivity when it comes to servers maintenance and problem solving”, enthusiastically says Fabrice Fossaert, operating manager of BHS.

+1

 

[Dylan]

Talk about a misleading thread title! This is just an expansion of an almost two-year-old datacenter.

 

[VPSCorey]

The towers and all that liquid cooled piping was a huge issue for them I'm sure.  I think Facebook and Google have better designs for low PUE datacenters, but they operate on monolithic server builds that rarely change so they can afford to make them as easy to service as possible.  A hosting company carries any number of server builds that need to be housed in a mixed env and customized as needed.  I think OVH's original Canadian data center did not make this easy to do.

 

[drmike]

The location, previously owned by the company Rio Tinto Alcan, an aluminum smelter

Can you say massively polluted toxic waste site?  Probably another superfund style unusable land minimally contained on the cheap and pawned off as a datacenter location.

Glad it didn't become an office park like they do in many old industrial towns and ruin the health of desk workers.

 

[DomainBop]

Can you say massively polluted toxic waste site?

...oh but they cleaned it and demolished the really toxic buildings after they closed it in 2009...   That aluminum plant was built in 1943 and was closed because it used outdated smelting technology.

Beauharnois Works, where electrolysis activity

was shut down in 2009, transferred part of its

industrial site to the City of Beauharnois at

the end of 2011. In compliance with regulatory

requirements and Rio Tinto Alcan standards, the

facility first characterised and decontaminated

the land, demolished and disposed of the

obsolete structures, and cleaned up the

Beauharnois Works, where electrolysis activity

was shut down in 2009

 

[lbft]

Can you say massively polluted toxic waste site?  Probably another superfund style unusable land minimally contained on the cheap and pawned off as a datacenter location.

Glad it didn't become an office park like they do in many old industrial towns and ruin the health of desk workers.

Aluminium smelters use a crapload of electricity and produce heat. Luckily there's a hydroelectric power station right next door and the existing structure was built with cooling in mind. Lots of power available at what is probably a comparatively cheap rate (basically no transmission loss, the power station was built in the 30s-60s when the smelter was pulling a lot of juice, etc.), suiting the load pattern of a datacentre. It's also right next to the water, if they want to use water cooling systems (which I believe they use in at least one of their French DCs).

I dunno, seems a pretty good site choice to me.

 

[sv01]

Talk about a misleading thread title! This is just an expansion of an almost two-year-old datacenter.

Opps sorry, can't edit the title.


Some picture from @olesovhcom

 

[drmike]

...oh but they cleaned it and demolished the really toxic buildings after they closed it in 2009...   That aluminum plant was built in 1943 and was closed because it used outdated smelting technology.

Beauharnois Works, where electrolysis activity

was shut down in 2009, transferred part of its

industrial site to the City of Beauharnois at

the end of 2011. In compliance with regulatory

requirements and Rio Tinto Alcan standards, the

facility first characterised and decontaminated

the land, demolished and disposed of the

obsolete structures, and cleaned up the

Beauharnois Works, where electrolysis activity

was shut down in 2009

Bahahaha.  Sure they cleaned it up.

Aluminum is some nasty polluting stuff.  I expect it has been forced to be ran cleaner, but that site was long before sensibility kicked in.  Meaning they open dumped waste all over there.   Well soaked in.

Usually such a site is all sorts of funny government slush money.  Wondering how much OVH received to open up there

 

[Ravi-EstroWeb]

Opps sorry, can't edit the title.


Some picture from @olesovhcom

Really Nice .. +1 from my side