The juggernaut of European web hosting OVH is one step closer to getting its North American operation off the ground with the first 1000 of their planned 360,000 servers going live in the ‘alpha’ test of its new Quebec facility.
OVH have come a long way since their formation in 1999—the Roubaix-based company is now the largest host in Europe with 100,000 dedicated servers across France, and they are hoping to grow that number another 360,000 by cracking the North American market. To that end they have acquired a former aluminum plant in Beauharnois, a small town in French-speaking Quebec. Beyond the obvious advantage of a common language, this acquisition also makes sense in that the former metalworks and its location share many of the same design goals of a datacentre.
The mutual need for cheap, readily available power is served by Quebec’s hydroelectric dams and delivered through the plant’s own private substation. The building itself was designed to dissipate the intense heat generated in the smelting of alumina, something that should prove useful when it’s filled with rack-upon-rack of servers. And while not the most central of locations, especially for the US market, by OVH’s estimates there are sufficiently fast connections to population centres such as New York and Chicago to effectively provide dedicated servers and cloud computing to as much as 25-30% of the USA’s population.
So what does this mean for us? More choice and more competition in the North American dedicated server market, for one thing. OVH, especially their ‘Kimsufi’ line of self-managed servers, have a well-earned reputation for being solid value for money in Europe, and hopefully that’s something that will continue with this new venture. Anyone interested in picking up a new dedicated box could be in for a bit of a wait though; for the moment the new datacentre is in ‘alpha’ with testing planned to continue until May to fine tune the network and optimise routing before a period of larger scale ‘beta’ testing and the eventual rollout sometime this August.
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