If free cooling is actually a critical part of future data centre best practices, wouldn’t you expect many U.S. companies to be flocking north?
“Well, we’re not much different than Denmark or many locations in the United States from an average temperature perspective,” said Darin Stahl, lead analyst with Info-Tech Research Group.
“This isn’t a Field of Dreams thing where ‘if you build it, they will come,’ because most companies want to keep there data centres fairly close. We’re still an industry of server huggers.”
So, the short answer, according to Stahl is to not expect large U.S. corporations rushing out to places like Thunder Bay or Nunavut to house their primary data centre operations.
But the key word, he added, is primary.
Canada could be ripe for a secondary data centre marketplace for companies looking at a very distant failover site, the analyst said.
“We’ve got data privacy, a smart and relatively cost effective workforce, you can get to many places through a data line relatively easily and we’re not a country that’s going to fall apart politically,” Stahl said. “Not withstanding what’s gone on at our Parliament recently.”