As some of you may know from our earlier emails, the time has finally come to officially announce the launch of our brand new datacentre! A bit of background first, it has been a long time coming for us to move into a new space, being sold out of space in our two current datacentres shortly after opening them. The new datacentre will be slightly different than how we have done things for our last two datacentres, but for the better!
Now to the good part, after diligent research and consideration we have selected Cologix as our new datacentre infrastructure partner to work with on this exciting new chapter. Our new space will be a private cage area in their new VAN3 facility. We have opted to go this route versus building our own as we have done for our first two datacentres for a few reasons. First, the time to open is much faster as most of the datacentre is already built and ready to go. Second, we are able to offer a much higher level of power and cooling redundancy to full Tier 3 standards at a lower upfront investment than if we were to build it from scratch. Our team has fully designed our space, and we will be working with Cologix on the implementation.
Given that the Cologix VAN3 space we have designed is over double our current capacity, and the aforementioned increased redundancy we have made the decision to fully migrate all customers in our current YVR1 and YVR2 datacentres. We understand the pain and hassle it is for our customers to have to move their mission critical workloads, but we believe this migration will be for the better and we’ll be here every step of the way to ensure a smooth migration.
Timeline and Migration Plan
Timelines for the transition will be as follows:
YVR1 (Burnaby Datacentre) – January 2020, fully decommissioned February 15th, 2020
YVR2 (Coquitlam Datacentre) – March 2020, fully decommissioned near end of 2020
Unfortunately, the YVR1 timeframe is a little rushed, but that is how it worked out with the leasing of the current space. We will have our new datacentre operational by mid-January and will start moving existing customer workloads shortly thereafter. YVR1 customers can expect to receive correspondence from our team in the next few weeks with plans and timelines for your specific migration plans.
For any customers using our hosted services such as email or voice, there will be no interruption to those services as they are highly available across our other datacentres. Bare metal dedicated server customers and colo customers with workloads across our other points-of-presence (PoP) should have minimal to no impact.
Our other Points-of-Presence
We will be keeping our other main points-of-presence (PoP) operational, so to summarize:
- YVR0 – 555 W Hastings, Vancouver (Harbour Centre). The main peering exchange/carrier hotel building in Vancouver.
- Qnet – City of Coquitlam Datacentre to access the city fibre network
- BridgeNet – City of New Westminister Datacentre to access the city fibre network
- YYZ0 – 151 Front Street, Toronto. The main peering exchange/carrier hotel building in Toronto.
- YYC0, Calgary. PoP to connect to YYCIX.
And a little confusing, but as we are decommissioning the existing YVR1 and YVR2 facilities, our new datacentre will still be named YVR1 (for the remainder of this post, we’ll refer to it as “new YVR1”).
A few highlights for new YVR1
- Located less than 15 minutes from our existing YVR1 datacentre, and less than 30 minutes from YVR2
- Easily accessible from Highway 1, located just off the Grandview Hwy exit
- Standalone building, concrete and brick, seismic reinforced
- Security staffed and patrolled 24x7x365
- K-rated fence (we think is pretty cool, checkout some videos of it on YouTube)
- Biometrics and fob access, with full interlock (using a Boonedam, something we also think is pretty cool)
- N+1 power and cooling
- 100% SLA on power and cooling
- Up to 20kW power density per cabinet
- Diverse fiber entrances
- Uptime Tier III certification of Constructed Facility; pursuing SOC 1 (SSAE18/ISAE3402) Type 2 & SOC 2 Type 2 attestation reports
- Cross-zoned VESDA
- Common area workspace
Specific to our design
- Our first pod of cabinets will be the same hot-aisle containment as our current facilities, with the unique aspect of what we are calling availability zones. One side, “row 1” will be A+B power and “row 2” will be C+D power, so customers requiring an extra level of redundancy can deploy across both availability zones.
- As we have done at existing YVR1, all cabinet doors will include electronic access control for additional security and convenience.
- Able to offer partitioned cabinets, starting with half cabs and eventually quarter cabs. Continue to offer of course full cabinets and our shared colocation cabs.
- Upgraded our core routers, with new Juniper MX960’s. We will have two full chassis deployed to support a fully meshed access/aggregation layer.
- For those who have been inside our existing YVR1 datacentre, you know it’s a little tight on space, our new space will include more room for a workbench and tool area.
Other exciting stuff upcoming
For another post as this is getting a little long, we will also be finally launching our own peering exchange, dubbed CloudSingularity Internet Exchange (CSIX). We are working out the details still, however our plan is to have a switch fabric across all our PoP’s (not just those in BC) that members can connect to.
We also still have plans in the works for our next datacentre which will be fully designed and built from scratch by us. Stay tuned for a blog series following that step by step.
Conclusion
I know that’s a lot of information to take in, so I’ll end the post here. Customers can expect to receive additional emails from us over the comings weeks to coordinate. In the meantime feel free to reach out to our team if there are any questions or concerns.
