At more than 40,000 square feet, this new data centre is more than twice the size of a professional hockey rink and marks the first time PEER 1 Hosting is offering all three hosting solutions – colocation, dedicated hosting and managed hosting – in Canada.

The opening of the flagship data centre is also the first time PEER 1 is offering all three hosting solutions under one roof, enabling small- and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) to conveniently choose the right solution for their business.

“The Internet is a vital platform for our customers, and it continues to grow,” said Fabio Banducci, president and CEO for PEER 1 Hosting.

“Our new state-of-the-art Toronto data centre ensures we stay current and provide the fastest and most reliable network to serve our customers, now and in the future, while providing PEER 1 with enhanced flexible capacity to support its own growth.”

This is the most efficient data centre PEER 1 Hosting has built to date, with increased power densities, high reliability, and robust security.

Building it in four sections, with each section built as a separate Performance Optimized Data Centre (POD), enables customers to expand their data centre capacity faster than ever before, while allowing PEER 1 to cost-effectively manage growth.

The new data centre utilizes some of the most efficient products and technologies on the market. This includes a redundant critical cooling infrastructure using both a local well for primary water supply and a connection to the city’s water system.

“We’re also using redundant high-efficiency Variable Frequency Drive centrifugal chillers to reduce cooling costs and condenser towers with economizers,” adds Ryan Murphey, vice president of facilities and data center operations for PEER 1 Hosting.

“This enables PEER 1 to lessen the environmental impact of the data center by taking advantage of “free cooling” when the temperature drops below 10C.”

Each of the four PODs has the capacity for approximately 270 cabinets, equivalent to roughly 7,500 servers.

The first POD, built at an estimated capital cost of US$10 million, will include 7,500 square feet of data center space and an additional 8,000 square feet of office space, and inventory, network and storage areas to support the data centre.

SMEs can start purchasing space as early as February 1, 2010, and begin moving in their equipment in March 2010. The remaining three PODs (22,500 square feet) will be dedicated to additional data center space and infrastructure to be built out in future phases based upon customer demand.

The new data centre will be built to a Tier II specification with the option to become Tier III when additional PODs are added.

This will be PEER 1 Hosting’s third data centre in Toronto and the company’s 17th worldwide, adding to its managed network spanning 13,000 route miles of fibre.

The company says it preserved its 100 percent uptime pledge to customers during the terrible Atlanta weather, as its data center staff put into practice the company’s strategic crisis planning.

Equipped with 17 points-of-presence across North America connected together by a fully redundant network with 15 state-of-the-art data centers in 12 cities, PEER 1 says it is capable to avoid network disturbance at any time. If an area of the network is ever at jeopardy, PEER 1 says its technical team rapidly responds to reroute data flow to another region of the network.

Throughout the storms, PEER 1 employees from other data centers throughout the country, including Miami, Florida, Fremont, California and San Antonio, Texas were fully equipped to step in as needed for both technical and customer service issues.

Earlier this week, network infrastructure provider Juniper Networks announced that PEER 1 is using Juniper’s M-series Multiservice Edge Routers in all its major points of presence around the world.