OVH is delivering on its promises at last years OVH Summit in Paris and expanding its US data centre estate. In Paris, Octave Klaba said that the company would open a data centre on the West Coast. He told the audience one problem they faced was that potential sites in California were being bought for farming Marijuana. This had pushed property prices too high. After a long search OVH has acquired a data centre in Hillsboro, Oregon, 20 miles outside of Portland. It is planning to deploy 80,000 servers on the property and it is the first West Coast data centre for the company.
This data centre will provide redundancy for OVH’s existing facility in Vint Hill, Virginia when that goes live. Customers looking at Vint Hill will also be able to scale-out to Hillsboro as they look for lower latency for cloud services. Oregon is a good location for OVH. It reduces its energy costs by building its own servers and then water cooling them. It is a state with plentiful supply of water and one where green energy generators are beginning to build facilities. This will give OVH options as it looks to keep it power costs to a minimum and compete with other global data centre vendors.
Hillsboro is already home to six very large data centres. They are all connected to a high-speed fibre optic network called the Hillsboro Data Center Ring. It will have been one of the reasons that OVH choose to buy a facility there. It already operates a 10TB/s fibre network between its facilities worldwide.
Conclusion
This is not a new build for OVH unlike its Vint Hill data centre. However, the press release does not say who it has purchased the data centre from or when it expects it to go live. Vint Hill is still a couple of months away from completion so it may be that Hillsboro could go live first.
