iWeb Communities: Blog

The launch of our new Smart Servers coincides with the opening of our 4th datacenter in Montreal.

This new facility has a 31,000 sq ft footprint and will bring our total capacity to 35,000 servers hosted in different strategic locations.

It was custom-built to accommodate our new automated provisioning systems and meet the same high standards of our 3 other data centers.

We also needed to build a platform to automate our business processes. It would have to be tightly integrated into the new data center as it was projected that our current dedicated server data centers would soon reach full capacity (they are used at more than 95% today). In fact, we needed to build the data center for the platform as much as the platform for the data center.

And build a new data center we did!

iWEB-NE is our biggest one so far. It is a dedicated server only facility and once all its building phases are completed, it will be home to more than 20,000 dedicated servers featuring automated provisioning and management. It was built from the ground up with automation in mind. It features a large network room and accommodate two separate networks for public and local interconnections.

We have been giving you some updates since our first annoucement last january. You will be able to appreciate all the work that has been done during the last 10 months:

iWEB-NE, second week of construction (January 2010)
iWEB-NE, News from iWEB-NE (May 2010)
iWEB-NE, In pictures (June 2010)

We rethought the network for automation

Three separate networks are needed for automation, the public Internet network, a local network for customers to exchange data between servers and shared services and a third network for management (KVM/IP, server re-installations, etc.) We also put a lot of importance on redundancy so we would reduce the presence of single points of failure.

At iWEB-NE, the public network is very similar to what you will find at iWEB-CL, iWEB-CO and iWEB-HD (iWeb’s other data centers). At iWEB-NE, the public network has multiple 10GIG uplinks and is interconnected directly to both the CL and CO data centers. All servers installed at iWEB-NE are physically connected to the public network for their Internet access.

But one big difference between iWEB-NE and iWeb’s other data centers is the addition of a full GIG local network for all servers installed at iWEB-NE. A private network is featured among most of the automated and cloud solutions today for provisioning, maintenance operations and in order to prevent manipulations or future interconnections of the installed servers. Once a server is installed it is connected to both the public and private networks and many kinds of configurations are possible without the need of physical modifications to the server or its network setup.

We also added a management network. Since we want to keep server costs as low as possible for all our customers, we use only two physical networks (servers are equipped with two network adapters and connected with two cables). We virtualized the third (the management network), used for server installations, re-installations and maintenance operations.

An overview of the data center features

Our CEO Eric Chouinard gives you a quick tour of the new facility. (This video is available in french only, subtitles will be available later on).

iWeb-NE in numbers

- Total available space: 31,000 square foot data center

- Smart Servers Zone: 20 000 servers capacity

- Electrical Room: 6,000 Amps electrical capacity

- Telco Zone: 76Gbps backbone capacity for centers

- Security: Biometrics Sensors, Cameras, Secured Areas

- Power management and cooling: in addition to glycol cooling system, XDC units are used to inject cold air allowing a higher density of servers.

Phase 1

- Cooling Units: 180 Tons Cooling Capacity

- UPS: 500 kVA

- Generator: 1,500 Kilowatt (KW) Diesel Generator

As you can tell, there are a lot of innovations happening in this data center! We hope you enjoyed the tour!