After six months of building what was, in its entirety, a two-year-long project, RackForce opened the first phase of its new data center in Canada. The facility, housed in a previously existing retrofitted building, is located in Kelowna, B.C.

Most utility power supplied to the GigaCenter by a company called Fortis is hydroelectric, making its carbon footprint considerably small. "It's about 23 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour," RackForce VP of Sales and Marketing Brian Fry said.

About 95 percent of power that flows through the grid in Kelowna is hydro and the rest is mostly contributed by a gas/thermal system in Vancouver.

The company has an agreement to receive up to 40 MW at the new facility. Power supplied to the first phase is backed up by diesel generators but the company is planning to deploy more environmentally friendly bi-fuel generators in the second and final phase. Large natural gas pipelines run through the area and the part-natural-gas, part-diesel generators would take advantage of that supply.

The 30,000-square-foot first phase has 17,200 square feet of raised floor, Fry said. Total area of the second phase will be 120,000 square feet and it was too early to tell on Monday how much raised floor would be available after the expansion.

IBM did a lot of engineering for the project, including rack design geared for cold-isle containment.

Fry said the new facility signified a shift away from the tradition of thinking about city cores as best locations for data centers.

"Because of virtualization and new network technology, data centers that sit in remote parts of North America can be greener," he said.

RackForce provides colocation, computing resources, management and network services.