TORONTO and BARRIE – The opening of IBM’s $90-million data centre promises to drive new research discoveries that will improve data management in areas ranging from health care, water conservation, energy, to even managing traffic lights to improve traffic flow. The IBM funding is supported through the Government of Ontario's previous $15 million investment towards these initiatives.
The Barrie, Ontario-based IBM Canada Leadership Data Centre has been designed with the latest advancements in energy efficient data center management, business continuity, resiliency, security and disaster recovery services to help organizations efficiently manage growth while reducing costs and securely mitigating risk.
As IBM’s 18th data centre it provides advanced data storage space, security and disaster recovery services for clients. In time, the centre will include 'cloud' computing capabilities to help support ongoing research initiatives at the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre.
“This new facility provides a flexible foundation ingrained in best-practices so we can deliver essential services to help organizations and partners better manage data, reduce operating costs, improve productivity and gain competitive advantage.” said John Lutz, president, IBM Canada in a news release.
The centre will create 20 skilled jobs in Barrie, as a portion of the $175 million IBM invested and 145 jobs created through the earlier launch of the research and development centre network.
IBM says half of Canadian organizations recently surveyed reported that providing sufficient data centre space and ensuring the availability required to meet customer service demands are among their top challenges. However it has found that organizations typically spend about 70% of their IT budgets simply maintaining existing environments. In parallel, analyst firm IDC estimates the amount of information managed by enterprises will grow 50 times over the next decade with the number of associated servers installed by organizations increasing by 49% in the next two years.
Leading organizations are taking steps to address these issues says IBM. The company’s survey of 300 IT leaders, the 21% of organizations who ran efficient data centres were able to spend 50% more on new projects and innovation to make their organizations more successful.
The new centre says IBM will help organizations adapt existing processes and infrastructure or cost-effectively invest to more efficiently support business growth and mitigate the risk of costly system outages.
For example, the centre will provide synchronous replication of data with another centre that is within 100 kilometres. This means, says IBM, organizations that rely on critical 24/7 systems can locate their primary IT operations in one centre and establish a data recovery centre far enough away to reduce the risk of a geographic disaster impacting both sites, but close enough to ensure operational or customer data is always available.
