Last week, I had the opportunity to visit Hypertec‘s Montreal installation. I’ve been a free software consultant for a good while, worked in quite a few public and private data centers, and visited a lot more – but I had never heard about Hypertec before. My visit was motivated by this client who asked me to follow the ‘tour’ and to advice him on their data center, installation and setup.
About Hypertec
As a rule, never visit somewhere without background info : Hypertec-BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) (they also use the name Hypertec-AS for the french version) is the hosting, datacenter & high availability services division of the Hypertec Group. The group look like an umbrella corporation which also hold the Hypertec Systems division (kind of a computer retail shop). The exact financial details are private (the group is private / NOT available in the stock market), but from what I’ve heard, the whole group have about 120+ employee and a sales figure of about 20M$/years. Those are very rough numbers, I could be totally off the track, and include all their activities (don’t know for the data center aspect only). There seems to be office in a couple locations (Montreal, Quebec, Ottawa, Toronto… ).
So, its quite strange that I haven’t heard about them… especially since they are located inside the old Nortel building in Saint-Laurent. I’ve also contact friends about them, and they were virtually unknown!
The visit
… and this is why I’m doing a blog post on them: because Jonathan Ahdoot, sales manager, walked me through their data center and I must say, he was able to impress me. The main surface is reserved for tier-4 dedicated cages to which you can add a small quantity of tier-2 rack (about 60) setup. As a reminder, in datacenter higher tier speak of better quality (scale from 1 to 4 – as defined by the uptime institute)(different from Internet peering tier).
The visit make clear quite fast why I hadn’t heard about them : they fish for the big ones and government (which can be considered a big one) contracts. They have rooms for rent that act as office away from office for couples of days, they have a 10 posts technical room, a cafeteria (which can become 24h) and … behold: a lounge. Yes ! a true lounge with satellite TV and couches. How many time would I have given everything (my clients own ;-)) for a nice couch while waiting for a file copy between the SAN and the server I’m restoring @ 2h AM. They also make their conference room available to clients (which is another nice feature, especially for office-less consultant (me!)).
I’m far from being a data center specialist: I build infrastructure and I rack them somewhere – this is mainly what I do. So I cannot go into big details about all the nice features the data center seemed to have or in the small point why it might not be as great as I think. However, there is one thing that did impress me: There is 5 flywheel energy storage system in the main engineering room, all being provided by electricity (Hydro) and hooked on a generator. This was also the first time I’ve heard about flywheel energy storage (FES), but I do find the idea quite neat. There must be a lot of energy lost through friction (even if they are in vaccum), but it does look like a system way more secure than batteries (UPS) for data center. Secure as in : I’ve already been screwed twice by “this was a planned maintenance and the ups didn’t turned on, or the tech turned off the wrong line”.
But the sky is not totally blue: Since they do seem to target tier-4 clients, they lack a bit of the standard facility we require in a tier-2: renting 48U racks rarely leave you the space for screen, mouse, keyboard, screwdriver… you expect them to be readily available on site. From what I’ve saw, they were either lacking or in bad shape (tier-2, again… the tier-4 look awesome). Anyway, if you got a cage (with multiple rack) and you don’t have space for tools, you have others problems.
Anyway, a couples contracts will require me to be in data center for the next few months (migrating 35U, deploying 20U, re-designing 24U…). So I guess I will be posting more reviews as time goes.