Many fortune 1000 companies operate data centers in Ashburn within colocation facilities. Although data centers are built to operate 24/7/365, major companies don’t take the risk to have a major site go down. Montreal is the perfect location for companies in Ashburn to replicate their IT production.
What is a disaster recovery site?
A disaster recovery (DR) site has one goal and one goal only: Ensure uptime.
Data centers are built to be redundant and operate even in the event of a power grid failure, but what happens if worse happens? We won’t go into details about what these events are, but we generally find them listed in the list of “Force majeure” events in business contracts.
There come into play DR sites. DR sites may be a passive mirror or be set-up in an active-active setup with another data center. No matter the configuration, the point is that if site A fails, site B can allow the company to maintain its operations with little to no downtime.
For small companies, the cost of an active DR site might not be worth it, but for larger companies with hundreds of employees on the payroll, downtime is impossible and costly.
Why Montreal is the best location to back-up a data center in Ashburn
Montreal is quite far from Ashburn
When choosing a disaster recovery site, risk management or insurance companies will often look at the distance between the two sites. As Montreal is 780 Km (or 484 miles) from Ashburn, most companies will consider the two cities far enough to be considered redundant.
Smaller companies will often consider 150 Km far enough to be redundant, but when we are talking about Fortune 1000 organizations, risk management is on a whole other level.
Low-cost data center services
For data center managers, a DR site is critical. However, it’s not always easy to make upper management understand the importance of such expenses. Deploying a DR site in Montreal will allow your company to deploy a proper DR site at the best possible cost. How? Montreal has the lowest power cost in North-America and a cool climate. These two factors make it so it is especially cheap to operate a data center in Montreal, reducing your bill.
On the retail side of the colocation market, you can expect to pay C$ 240-300/KW/Month in an A+B power configuration. On the wholesale side, this can drop down to C$180$/KW/Month ($135 USD at the time of writing).
Green and renewable power
Low costs are great and all, but businesses are more and more environmentally conscious. As of 2017, Ashburn is mostly getting its power by unrenewable and “dirty” power sources. In a perfect world, companies would move their data centers in places where power is green, but moving a production site isn’t easy.
Montreal is on Quebec’s national power grid, maintained by Hydro Quebec. As the name hints, Hydro Quebec mostly uses Hydroelectric power that is known to be renewable and green.
By deploying your DR data center in Montreal, your company will reduce its carbon footprint.
Access to a variety of network paths
Montreal has multiple fiber paths that allow data centers in Montreal to stay connected to the internet no matter what. Montreal’s main path towards the US passes through Albany, from where it is possible to access NYC and Ashburn. On the west side, Montreal also has fiber to Toronto that then connects to Chicago. Finally, companies like British Telecom has fiber that connects Montreal to London.
With these multiple fiber paths, even in the event of a catastrophic fiber cut, Montreal data centers would still be able to exchange traffic with the outside world.
Want to deploy a data center to backup your infrastructure? Contact-us.