Answer Man: what’s on Bunker Road?

Dear Answer Man,

What are the two buildings at 1458 & 1460 Bunker Rd. by the McGill Road Yard Waste site? Neither of them have any identification, both have controlled entry fences and are surrounded by some serious fences. The one at 1458 is literally “bristling” with surveillance cameras everywhere.

CATHY

Dear Cathy,

Smile, you’re on candid surveillance.

Those two buildings with the imposing security cameras and fencing are both data centres.

The more mysterious of the two is the one at 1460 Bunker Road, which is the Q9 Data Centre that opened in April, 2011. Even City officials who were asked about it at the time couldn’t disclose much detail about the centre because they had to sign a confidentiality agreement.

We were able to dig up some background, however. Q9 is a Canadian company with data centres across the country. Kamloops was chosen as a B.C. location because it is seismically much more stable than the Coast.

The Kamloops centre is planned for two phases and six megawatts to provide data storage services for the provincial government, as well as private and public sector customers in Western Canada.

According to the company web site, that mysterious building that few of us will ever enter includes “outside air cooling capability to maximize energy efficiency, biometric security systems, multiple connections to the Internet, redundant power, redundant cooling and advanced fire detection and suppression systems, as well as 7×24 on-site security and technical support teams.”

Q9 operates 10 data centres in three provinces.

The other building at 1458 Bunker Road was an easier one to hunt down. Telus just opened its Kamloops Internet Data Centre to big fanfare at the end of January.

According to Telus, it’s one of eight internet data centres it has across Canada. The heavily watched Kamloops centre is the foundation of the company’s next-generation cloud computing services for Canadian businesses.

It was built at a cost of $75 million, with the option to be increased in size for more storage capacity in future.

The centre involved the creation of 75 jobs, 25 of them in Kamloops.

Telus spokeswoman Liz Sauvé said those 25 staff include IT technicians, electrical and mechanical technicians, logistics administrators, security personnel and managers. While the grand opening was held in late January, the centre has been up and running since fall of 2013.

The dry Kamloops climate is also an energy saver for the centre. It uses 80 per cent less energy and 86 per cent less water than a typical data centre. Outside air is used for cooling 99 per cent of the year while mechanical cooling is needed for 40 hours a year. That results in 2,500 tons of carbon dioxide being removed from the environment, or the equivalent emissions from 11,000 Canadian homes — almost half the households in Kamloops.

Because the centre was designed in modules, it can be added to easily as data storage demand grows. Sauvé said clients range from residents to small business owners to large corporations. Telus is already in the early stages of developing the next module for Kamloops.

Kamloops was chosen for the data centre not just because of its dry climate, but because it’s highly secure and a good option for customers wanting a core site or disaster-recovery site for their data, she said. That means there’s little seismic activity here, so there’s little chance of damage to the centre or the information stored therein. And because that data is so confidential, there’s a lot of security.

If you haven’t had enough about the centre yet, Sauvé included a link to a video about Telus’s Rimouski data centre which is a sister to the one in Kamloops. They share the same design and do the same job. Here’s the link: http://teamvision.iamota.com/play/7/?share=1&lang=en.

ANSWER MAN

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