CenturyLink Opens Second Toronto Data Center

CenturyLink has opened its second data center in the Greater Toronto area, consisting of 100,000 square feet of raised floor space and capable of supporting up to 5 megawatts of IT load.

Located in Markham, the facility has received Uptime Institute’s Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility and Design Documents. CenturyLink is pursuing Uptime Tier III for both design and construction on all of its new builds.

CenturyLink has long had a hosting presence in Toronto and the company reports that pre-sales for the new data center have gone well. The new TR3 facility brings the company’s total Toronto data center footprint to more than 11 megawatts of IT load capacity and approximately 185,000 square feet of raised floor.

The company's entire product portfolio including cloud and colocation will be available from TR3. The data center adds much needed capacity to meet demand. It also holds strategic importance in the market.

"Part of the importance of this facility is that it is far enough away from our initial Toronto facility that it fills a lot of disaster recovery requirements for customers," said Drew Leonard, VP, colocation product management. "We've also built out a metro ring from Toronto 1, To the new TR3 facility, to 151 Front street." The new data center opens its doors with 4 carriers on-site.

According to statistics collected and shared by the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, the Toronto region ranks among the top financial centers and technology hubs in the world.

“CenturyLink’s Toronto data centers not only support local businesses but also the company’s growing base of international clients that require in-Canada hosting delivery,” said Mark Schrutt, director, services and enterprise applications, at global analyst firm IDC.

CenturyLink now operates 57 data centers worldwide, including a Canadian footprint in the three major markets of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

It has been a very active 2014 for CenturyLink in terms of data center expansion. The initial plan for 2014 was to add more than 180,000 square feet and 20 megawatts to its global presence. "We’re always doing more expansion and recently kicked off another slate of projects," said Leonard. "At any given time we have 8-10 expansion projects."

The company recently opened a new facility in Minnesota and launched cloud in Toronto. CenturyLink recently launched a new private cloud service, offering to set up elastic private IT infrastructure for customers in any of its data centers around the world. CenturyLink has had a private cloud offering before, which came along with its acquisition of Savvis in 2011. Called Symphony Dedicated as part of Savvis’ product offerings, CenturyLink renamed it into Dedicated Cloud – a product that still exists and that the company still supports. CenturyLink’s colo roots remain core to its strategy.