Manitoba Telecom Services, the main telco carrier in the Canadian province and one of the largest telcos in Canada, announced plans to build a facility to provide data center services in Manitoba.

The CA$50m data center will be used to provide colocation, managed hosting, cloud and, of course, network connectivity services. The company expects to launch the facility in 2015.

Manitoba Telecom CEO Pierre Blouin said the company's business customers were increasingly using cloud for data storage and processing. “With this state-of-the-art data center, MTS will be able to deliver world-class solutions to Manitoba businesses, fulfilling an important and growing business need.”

MTS said the 70,000 sq ft data center will qualify for the Uptime Institute's Tier III certification. It will be the province's first custom-built commercial data center of this size, according to the company.

MTS said real estate costs in Manitoba were low and there was an abundant supply of low-cost “clean” power. The climate is cool, and the company plans to design the facility to take advantage of the weather for free cooling.

This is a second step in MTS's recent expansion into the IT-services market. The first one was its acquisition of Winnipeg-based EPIC Information Solutions, an IT infrastructure and managed services provider, in September.

MTS plans to use the skills and expertise of EPIC staff to operate the future data center.