RackForce in the News

 RackForce launches vCloud in Canada giving Canadians access to the most powerful cloud computing platform available without data privacy concerns. 

 Vancouver, December 7, 2011 - RackForce, a leading Canadian provider of Hybrid Cloud and Hosting services announced today at the Vancouver VMware Forum that it has launched its latest cloud service based on VMware vCloud. This nationwide service will be provided from RackForce’s Kelowna, Calgary and Toronto cloud facilities.

For immediate release

RackForce Hybrid Cloud Services Now Available over Alberta’s SuperNet

Calgary – RackForce Networks and Axia announced today that RackForce’s Hybrid Cloud Services are now directly connected to Alberta’s SuperNet.

For immediate release

RackForce Hybrid Cloud Services Now Available over Alberta’s SuperNet

Tim Dufour, RackForce CEO, and Murray Sigler, President Axia North America, sign the agreement between RackForce and Axia.

Calgary – RackForce Networks and Axia announced today that RackForce’s Hybrid Cloud Services are now directly connected to Alberta’s SuperNet.

Canadian based RackForce provides enterprise class Cloud Computing and related IT services to 1500 SMB to Fortune 500 Customers in 100 Countries around the world. Cloud services are typically offered over the Internet on a “best effort” basis, but by connecting its Kelowna, Calgary and Toronto Cloud Centers directly to Alberta’s SuperNet, RackForce is now able to provide an unprecedented level of speed, security and quality of service to Alberta customers, eliminating dependence on sometimes unreliable Internet service.

By adding RackForce’s Cloud to their IT plan, small, medium and large organizations in Alberta’s public and private sectors will also see IT services deployed in minutes as opposed to the months and at far less cost. RackForce utilizes VMware’s vCloud Director technology which enables an organization’s IT department, RackForce or a Solution Provider to deploy compute, storage, network and applications through a virtual datacenter control panel that is connected to RackForce’s cloud ready infrastructure.

“The power and reach of Alberta’s SuperNet combined with RackForce Cloud Services enables any size of organization in Alberta to really take advantage of the benefits of Cloud Computing,” Murray Sigler, President of Axia North America, commented. “This is the type of business enabling service the SuperNet was built for, and we are very pleased to have RackForce on board.”

Tim Dufour, Chief Executive Officer of RackForce, added, “RackForce has long been a supporter of the Open Access Network concept and its potential. We are very pleased to be working with Axia to provide our leading edge Cloud Computing Services on the SuperNet. I am convinced that customers will see unmatched agility, security and performance. Alberta now has a substantial advantage.”

About RackForce Networks Inc.

Canadian based RackForce is a leading provider of Hybrid Cloud and Hosting services. Its nationwide cloud ready infrastructure forms the foundation for enterprise class cloud computing, colocation and network services that are delivered to a worldwide customer base. For pictures and more information please go to: http://www.rackforce.com/information_center.html

About Alberta SuperNet

Alberta’s SuperNet is the link that connects Albertans to each other and to the rest of the world. It is a state-of-the-art, ultra-high-speed network that connects more than 4,700 government facilities, including government offices, hospitals, schools, libraries, municipal offices and provincial courts around the Province of Alberta. Internet Service Providers can also connect to the SuperNet and use the infrastructure to extend high-speed Internet services into rural communities. Axia NetMedia Corporation enables service providers and government to connect Albertans across the province to Alberta’s SuperNet.

About Axia

Axia sells services over fibre optic communications infrastructure in jurisdictions that have implemented the Axia NGN Solution.  To date, Axia has networks in Alberta, France, Singapore, Spain and Massachusetts. Axia trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol “AXX”.

Media Contacts:

Dawn Tinling
VP, Investor Relations and Communications
Axia NetMedia Corporation
+1 403 538-4074
dawn.tinling@axia.com

Brian Fry
Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer
RackForce Networks Inc.
Office (250) 448-2226
Mobile (250) 512-1297
bfry@rackforce.com

Las Vegas – VMware’s Canadian partners and customers say the virtualization-software provider is on the right track with its vision for the future of IT, both on the end-user side of the equation and in the data centre.

In interviews during VMworld, VMware’s annual technology conference, resellers and service providers that use VMware’s cloud-focused solutions said that the software taps into IT trends such as the impending demise of the PC as the standard computing interface, and the need for simplified data-centre infrastructure.

Adi Kabazo is the manager, products and services, cloud services, hosting and data centre solutions at communications service provider Telus in Burnaby, B.C. In an interview at the conference, he agreed with VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz, who kicked off the event with a keynote indicating that the PC’s dominance is winding down as more and more users choose tablets and smartphones to access the web and corporate data.

“The work style is changing,” Kabazo said, explaining that the latest additions to Canada’s workforce are smartphone- and tablet-savvy. “The younger generation – even the devices we have here might not exist in the future,” he said, pointing to the laptop computers that people were using in the interview area.

Nagwa Koressa, president of Ottawa-based Integra Networks (a VMware channel partner), said new VMware software such as Horizon Application Manager, which provides access to SaaS and web-based applications from any device, paves the way for increased telework and remote-staffing situations.
 

More than 30 VMware Service Provider Partners deliver VMware vCloud® Powered Services Based on VMware vSphere®, vCloud DirectorTM and the vCloud API

Kelowna, B.C. – Hybrid Cloud Services provider RackForce Networks announced on Tuesday the addition of a general purpose Storage Area Network (SAN) offering to its portfolio of services. The new service provides solid performance, flexibility and reliability at a lower price point, and compliments RackForce’s existing high performance SAN offering.

Campbell, Calif.–May 25, 2011–Nimsoft today announced that RackForce, a leading provider of hybrid cloud computing solutions, has deployed Nimsoft Monitor to provide 24/7 monitoring of its clients’ critical infrastructure. 

RackForce has added SAS70 Type II and CICA 5970 Type B certification for its hybrid cloud services. The company is now certified for its entire Infrastructure as a Service offerings in the US and Canada.

Mobile (250) 512-1297

Many R&E organizations are wrestling with issue of clouds in terms of adoption and deployment.
Some plan to deploy their own clouds while others are looking to use commercial services.  A lot of the focus has been on clouds for research purposes – but there is also a huge opportunity in using for educational applications from grade school through to university.  I think R&E institutions can play a much more effective role in developing tools to use various commercial clouds, rather than spending precious resources deploying their own clouds.  For example education applications like Kuali  (http://kuali.org/) are ideally suited  to be deployed in the cloud. 

On Wednesday, February 16 SURF organize and IMS GLC in close cooperation withKennisnet an international conference on digital facilities and standardization within and abroad.

The range of digital cross-institution services and amenities is increasing. Examples are: Studielink; Studiekeuze123 and Hodex for central de-closing training information; Wikiwijs, Edurep and LOREnet for central unlocking materials, and Cloud services like Google Apps and Live at Edu who recently through SURFfederatie of Education - research sector and accessible.

With the proliferation of devices grows, the need for standardization of messages and business processes. Without these standards it is not possible with data services from the institutions to educate the exchange of information between different services difficult.

Audience
This meeting is aimed at information managers and CIOs, but also more technically minded will find enough interesting topics.

 The official language is English.

According to a recent McKinsey study, by 2020, the carbon foorprint of the computers running the internet will exceed that of air travel. Additionally, a Gartner study concludes that between 2005 and 2025, data center energy costs will rise 1,600%.

Trends like this forecast a big hit to the environment and company budgets alike. But with creativity and wise technological investments, your data center can be a minimal contributing factor in these spikes, saving green by going green.

“Not only is it good for everyone on the earth, it’s also good for our customers because they save money,” says Paul Durzan, director of unified computing at Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com). “The less power you use, the [fewer] components you buy, the more money you save.” 

The No. 1 Action You Can Take

According to Brian Fry, vice president of sales and marketing at RackForce Networks (www.rackforce.com), one factor outweighs all others in shrinking a data center’s carbon footprint: “At this point in time, the single biggest way to reduce carbon is to locate your data center at a renewable power source.”

According to a recent McKinsey study, by 2020, the carbon footprint of the computers running the Internet will exceed that of air travel. Additionally, a Gartner study concludes that between 2005 and 2025, data center energy costs will rise 1,600%.

Trends like this forecast a big hit to the environment and company budgets alike. But with creativity and wise technological investments, your data center can be a minimal contributing factor in these spikes, saving green by going green.

“Not only is it good for everyone on the earth, it’s also good for our customers because they save money,” says Paul Durzan, director of unified computing at Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com). “The less power you use, the [fewer] components you buy, the more money you save.”

The No. 1 Action You Can Take

According to Brian Fry, vice president of sales and marketing at RackForce Networks (www.rackforce.com), one factor outweighs all others in shrinking a data center’s carbon footprint: “At this point in time, the single biggest way to reduce carbon is to locate your data center at a renewable power source.”

Energy from renewable sources—solar, wind, hydroelectric—is often an option available from local power companies whose main sources of electricity are still based on fossil fuels. Of these, hydroelectric is ideal for data centers. While solar and wind work well for residential customers, whose demand waxes and wanes, hydroelectric better suits the continual power draw of data centers.

“It’s like a big battery,” Fry says, “because the water is behind a dam, so you can control when you need it. It’s steady and reliable and you always have it when you need it.”

Unfortunately, renewable energy often comes at a premium price, so once you go with a green energy source, the next priority is to use less of it.

Small Steps

Making incremental changes can add up to noticeable reductions in power consumption.

Upgrade to energy-efficient components. If it’s been a while since you’ve swapped out such components as UPSes, PDUs, and CRACs, newer models of these can make a difference.

“There are always improvements in that whole area,” Fry says. “I think what you’re seeing is improvements in energy savings in the 10 to 20% range for a lot of those things.”

He also notes seeing a 50% improvement over the traditional CRAC approach by using in-row coolers instead.

Adjust the thermostat. The viability of this depends on your room’s layout. Where servers are in a high-density cluster, a 10-degree boost in the thermostat could indeed lead to overheating. However, Fry says, “If you’ve spread out your servers properly so there isn’t a lot of density in any part of the data center, you can probably pull that off.”

Optimize your A/C flow. Whether it’s combined with turning up the thermostat or on its own, there’s a payoff in preventing cool air from pooling where it does no good and directing it where it’s needed.

The simplest method might be using floor fans. Fry also describes a clever low-tech method used at RackForce: channeling and confining airflow with the kind of thick, plastic curtains used in supermarket meat departments, which made “amazing improvements in our efficiency,” he says.

“What you need to do is control where the air sits around down low,” Fry says. “If you control that properly, then it cools and builds up, and then it nicely flows through the fronts of the servers and out the back.”

To further encourage the funneling action, RackForce mounted baffles on top of the racks to keep cool air from flowing over them as the area filled up, instead of through the server fronts.

Giant Leaps

The greatest potential for cutting energy consumption lies in replacing outmoded technologies with newer, better successors. In addition to its operational efficiency, virtualization is also one of the best ways to reduce power consumption, because it allows you to use less hardware to accomplish the same amount of work.

Also, evolving system designs are making drastic cuts in power consumption possible. A prime example is Fibre Channel over Ethernet, which consolidates storage and network traffic into a single cable type.

“Anytime you go with a Fibre Channel over Ethernet solution, you have a very good opportunity to reduce your energy,” says Cisco’s Durzan. FCoE can alone reduce power costs by 30%.

There’s also unified computing, with systems combining virtualization and dynamic provisioning to create an intelligent environment in which workloads shift among hardware as needed. In periods of low demand, this can let you shut down machines that aren’t in use.

One key strategy here is the use of service profiles, which specify the power requirements of applications on virtualized servers so they can draw what they need, but no more, when moving among hardware.

“By using service profiles, that’s been another very good way for customers to not only get operational efficiency, but also start to reduce the amount of servers in their data center,” Durzan says.

Although the costs of replacing entire systems, or even phasing components in gradually, may initially seem prohibitive, it’s really a matter of deciding where your budget goes.

“If you do the math on the cost of your power, your payback could actually be there quite easily,” says Fry. “Instead of paying for power, now you’re paying for technology.”

Design improvements have also led to more efficient cooling technologies, although there are more restrictions here than with upgrading network systems. It can be hugely difficult to retrofit a cutting-edge cooling system into an existing data center.

There’s also a growing trend in locating new data centers in cold climates to take advantage of “free cooling”: pumping the cooling system’s water outside to a kind of radiator, where it chills to air temperature before circulating back into the data center.

“About nine months a year we run with no [powered] chillers,” says RackForce Networks’ Fry. “We can run strictly off the free cooling system, which costs nothing other than buying the original technology.”

Looking ahead, this is why data centers of the future may increasingly lie far north of the businesses they serve.

RackForce delivers even more affordable business class cloud computing by adding a new entry-level cloud service to its line-up. The company believes its secure multi-tier cloud strategy built on its dynamic datacenter infrastructure will further strengthen its position as Canada's preeminent Cloud Services Provider

Imogo president Stewart Irvine says cloud computing all the way down is being able to access another computer remotely. He says it's also secure: The company's storage facility, the state of the art RackForce data centre in Kelowna, has a higher, security level than at banks and claims it's 'impenetrable' from hackers.
 

Irvine says RackForce's state of the art data centre in Kelowna has a higher security level than at banks and claims it's "impenetrable from hackers."

He also says holding information at a data centre gives companies the added security of not having to worry about stolen laptops, Blackberries or iPads because corporate data is not held in a hard drive. Also, RackForce backs up data several times so it will never be lost, Irvine says.

Pearson says she was impressed with Imogo's services and was not concerned about security issues when BCTIA decided to switch to cloud computing in August.

Instead of a traditional office with a server room, hard drives and software installed on employees' computers, workers now come in and simply log on to the Internet.

"Being in the industry we're in, we've been watching and monitoring cloud for a couple of years now," she says. "The great thing about this is it allows you to scale up as required so you're saving on your initial infrastructure cost and in my opinion, it does make sense and it will be the way companies go."

Laura Jones, the B.C. and Yukon vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, says she hasn't heard too much about cloud computing among small business owners, but says the concept has great potential.

"In small business, you have to be the IT department, the marketing department, the bookkeeper and you end up wearing a lot of hats. You're everything and to be able to lighten the load, in our opinion, could be a good thing," Jones says.

© Copyright (c) The Province

XPC Web Hosting is pleased to announce that we have launched a green enterprise hosting initiative. Over the past month we have successfully moved our entire hosting operation into the RackForce Cloud hosting system located in the GigaCenter green data center in Kelowna, British Columbia

XPC Web Hosting is pleased to announce that we have launched a green enterprise hosting initiative. Over the past month we have successfully moved our entire hosting operation into the RackForce Cloud hosting system located in the GigaCenter green data center in Kelowna, British Columbia.

“As a business grade web hosting company in Vancouver we are proud that our operations are now located in the RackForce GigaCenter and running off their enterprise cloud solution.” says Shone Anstey VP operations for XPC Web Hosting. “In addition our clients have expressed their approval and excitement to have their websites at such an eco friendly environment.”

“XPC Web Hosting has been with RackForce for almost 2 years now. They are a fast growing web hosting company and recently needed to add more powerful infrastructure to meet their growing needs.” Brian Fry, RackForce Vice President - Sales and Marketing “By migrating their operations to the RackForce enterprise cloud infrastructure they have positioned themselves for rapid growth.”

Datacenters are one of the largest consumers of electrical energy in North America and thus one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Ensuring that they are as environmentally responsible as possible has become critical due to both the rising cost of energy and the onset of global climate change. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a green datacenter, among those power source and power consumption are the two biggest.

Datacenters in many areas are powered by coal-fired or natural gas electrical generation plants. These datacenters emit tremendous amounts of CO2 as a bi-product of their power consumption.

Tapping into British Columbia's abundant supply of clean hydroelectric power, the RackForce GigaCenter has a carbon footprint which is 50 times smaller than the average coal-powered North American datacenter.

In addition by locating the data center in the Okanagan’s temperate climate, it uses new technology to take advantage of cool outside temperatures to regulate the temperature inside the data center. In addition, design choices like cold aisle containment and modular construction seriously reduce power use. Finally, technologies like virtualization, unified fabric network, and cloud computing improve IT efficiency.

About us:
XPC Web Hosting is located in Vancouver Canada, and specializes in business and ecommerce hosting with expertise in Magento shopping carts and Wordpress websites. We have been in the hosting industry since 2004. Additional information can be found at www.xpcwebhosting.com.

Contact

Canadian researchers hope to stem the global IT industry's rampant output of greenhouse gas emissions by perfecting a way to host the Internet's content purely on green power.

And if their experiment succeeds, Canada could essentially become the world's largest Internet server — powered with almost no carbon footprint — and help reduce one of the most significant, growing sources of pollution.

Canadian researchers hope to stem the global IT industry's rampant output of greenhouse gas emissions by perfecting a way to host the Internet's content purely on green power.

And if their experiment succeeds, Canada could essentially become the world's largest Internet server — powered with almost no carbon footprint — and help reduce one of the most significant, growing sources of pollution.

The GreenStar Network is a two-year project funded by the Canadian Advanced Network and Research for Industry and Education, which aims to address the IT industry's incessant energy consumption. It's estimated that two to eight per cent of the world's energy consumption is drained by computers and the IT field, and the industry's explosive growth may propel it to a 20 per cent share in some countries by 2020.

“Two or three per cent is about the same as the aviation industry so a lot of people say, ‘What's the big deal?' The problem is it's growing, the rate of growth for the IT industry is six per cent per year and that's because of all the new applications and all the new toys we have,” said Bill Arnaud, former chief research officer for CANARIE and now a green IT consultant.

Worse, much of that IT energy usage is coming from the dirtiest energy source, coal-fired plants, which necessitates an urgent shift to greening the industry, said Mr. Arnaud.

The researchers behind the GreenStar project are working on a concept that would see interconnected data centers stationed across the country and powered solely by green energy. A main knock against renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power is that they're intermittent and not reliable enough to power applications that need a steady supply of power. But the GreenStar concept would allow data to be beamed across the network to wherever renewable sources are available, so even if wind isn't blowing in one part of the country, it likely would be elsewhere. Other always-on hydroelectric servers would also be available.

The two-year project will be small but is being designed to identify how the concept could be scaled in a big way, so even the world's largest websites could be reliably hosted almost carbon-free and without interruption. And the researchers also hope to devise a formula that would be used in carbon markets, so companies in jurisdictions powered by coal could get carbon credits for hosting their data in Canada.

Mr. Arnaud said there's already some interest in green IT solutions but the demand will ramp up significantly when carbon pricing becomes a widespread — and expensive — reality.

“Eventually it will happen, it may not be this year, it may be a couple years, but the U.S. will have to pass some sort of cost or tax on carbon, either through a direct carbon tax or through a cap-and-trade bill,” Mr. Arnaud said.

“That, depending on which study you read and how it's administered, could triple the price of electricity if it's generated by coal.

“This is where Canada, given proximity to the U.S. market and its abundance of clean power, is in an ideal position to provide solutions for these companies.”

While the market for green services is still relatively small, there are some motivated companies staking a claim in the space. In 2007, Google set out to be completely carbon neutral, and this month announced a 20-year deal to acquire 114 megawatts of wind power in Iowa, enough to power several data centers.

Canadian company RackForce, based in Kelowna, B.C., is partnering in the GreenStar Network and is already offering green hosting services. In 2008, the company signed a deal with IBM to build a $75-million green data centre powered by hydroelectric energy, which it bills as one of the most environmentally-friendly in the world. It has an estimated carbon footprint about 50 times smaller than its coal-powered equivalent, said company co-founder and vice-president Brian Fry.

Mr. Fry estimates only about 10 per cent of his business currently comes from companies that are serious about going green, and says it will likely take a real fiscal incentive to drive more change.

“You're either going to reward someone for going green or you're going to penalize them for not going green, it's one of the two,” he said.

He imagines a future where Canada could take as much as 30 to 40 per cent of the world's web hosting business if cap-and-trade and carbon pricing takes off.

“That sounds extreme but there's more things at play here than just the power source — the other part that is really key is the colder climates,” he said, and explained that a large part of the IT world's energy consumption is associated with cooling, to keep computers from overheating and shutting down.

Canada — and other cold climate countries — have the upper hand since it's easier to keep computer rooms at the right temperature when the local climate isn't sweltering.

“We can now implement cooling systems that use outside air and so the Canadian climate is by far one of the best for that,” Mr. Fry said.

He applauded the GreenStar project and said it has the potential to be huge.

“The GreenStar project is one of those landmark projects that could make the difference because it's not just intended to happen in Canada, it's designed to go into the U.S., there's European partners involved as well.”

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Data center Operator and Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) announced on Tuesday it has completed its multi-million dollar power and cooling addition to its Tier III equivalent, 30,000 square foot GigaCenter in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Data center Operator and Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) announced on Tuesday it has completed its multi-million dollar power and cooling addition to its Tier III equivalent, 30,000 square foot GigaCenter in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada.

RackForce decided to upgrade the data center after seeing strong demand for cloud computing and disaster recovery services.

The GigaCenter, which opened one year ago, uses British Columbia's abundant supply of clean, renewable hydroelectric power.

"We could not be happier," says Rick Ellery, RackForce's VP of business development.

"Arguably we have proven the GigaCenter model is the most efficient, scalable and resilient design available. There is no data center in Canada, including telco data centers, that is better  positioned to deliver cloud and disaster recovery."

The GigaCenter's advanced engineering and scalable modular design ensured that customers did not experience any service interruptions during the capacity upgrade.

The facility uses advanced cooling and power management technologies and are supported by

a private 10Gbps redundant network to major Canadian and US cities.

RackForce's GigaCenter maximizes network, server and cooling efficiency by supporting power densities up to 25KW per rack.

This is achieved through RackForce's Absolute Air Separation where chilled water is fed from free cooling chillers to in-row coolers located inside environmentally controlled GigaVaults.

Since hot and cold air are not mixed, cold air is directed to cooling the IT equipment which significantly reduces power usage by up to 50 percent for a typical customer, says the company.

Kelowna, B.C. - Datacenter Operator and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) announced on Tuesday it had completed its multi-million dollar power and cooling addition to its Tier III equivalent GigaCenter, seeing strong demand for cloud computing and disaster recovery services.

Kelowna, B.C. - Datacenter Operator and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) announced on Tuesday it had completed its multi-million dollar power and cooling addition to its Tier III equivalent GigaCenter, seeing strong demand for cloud computing and disaster recovery services.

This announcement follows RackForce's April 2010 launch of its Dynamic Datacenter Services Cloud which has seen quick uptake with customers. RackForce is the first service provider in Canada to launch cloud services on the Cisco Nexus and UCS, and IBM server and XIV storage platforms.

"We could not be happier", said Rick Ellery, RackForce's VP of Business Development. "Arguably we have proven the GigaCenter model is the most efficient, scalable and resilient design available. There is no datacenter in Canada, including Telco data centers, that is better positioned to deliver cloud and disaster recovery."

Due to the GigaCenter's advanced engineering and scalable modular design, customers did not experience any service interruptions during the capacity upgrade. The GigaCenter design allows for continuous and non-disruptive system and infrastructure upgrades.

RackForce's CEO Tim Dufour added, "The traditional datacenter approach, with large amounts of power and space in expensive office buildings, in high risk locations, is a dead model. Our highly efficient GigaCenter design, housed in a robust 30,000 Sq. Ft. single story building, is located in one of the lowest risk locations in the country. We leverage advanced cooling and power management technologies and are supported by our private 10Gbps redundant network to major Canadian and US cities. When customers move their IT workload to the GigaCenter it helps save our cities from crushing power demands created by an outdated IT vision."

RackForce's GigaCenter maximizes network, server and cooling efficiency by supporting power densities up to 25 Kilowatts per Rack, levels unheard of a few years ago. This is achieved through RackForce's Absolute Air Separation where chilled water is fed from Free Cooling chillers to in-row coolers located inside environmentally controlled GigaVaults. Hot and cold air are not mixed, ensuring that cold air is focused where it is most need - cooling the IT equipment. This results in significantly reduced power usage, by up to ½ for a typical customer. The benefits are lower costs to RackForce customers and, most importantly, reduces the impact of IT services on our planet.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is a leading provider of green dynamic datacenter services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its advanced datacenter design, automated systems and virtualization expertise, RackForce provides next-generation scalable colocation, cloud computing, server management, disaster recovery and network services to a worldwide customer base. RackForce is the first service provider in Canada to deliver cloud services on Cisco Nexus, UCS and IBM System X and XIV platforms. For more information, visit www.rackforce.com. For media pictures visit http://www.rackforce.com/press_kit.html.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Brian Fry
Vice President, Sales and Marketing
RackForce Networks Inc.
Office (250) 448-2226
Mobile (250) 512-1297

Kelowna, B.C. - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) announced on Wednesday that its ddsCloud Enterprise offering is now available for deployment to enterprise level customers. ddsCloud's components include Cisco Data Center 3.0 (Nexus network and UCS Servers), IBM Severs and IBM XIV Storage with virtualization and management technology from Microsoft, Cisco and VMware.

Kelowna, B.C. - Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) announced on Wednesday that its ddsCloud Enterprise offering is now available for deployment to enterprise level customers. ddsCloud's components include Cisco Data Center 3.0 (Nexus network and UCS Servers), IBM Severs and IBM XIV Storage with virtualization and management technology from Microsoft, Cisco and VMware.

This announcement follows RackForce's recent opening of its multimillion dollar "green" GigaCenter in the heart of British Columbia, Canada which was specifically engineered to support cloud computing.

"We envisioned our Dynamic Datacenter Services (dds) model eight years ago and have researched, developed, tested and deployed thousands of virtual servers in various service models before arriving at this moment today. I am pleased to announce the ddsCloud Enterprise, which is fully virtualized network, storage and compute capacity in an on demand model. The combination of ddsCloud Enterprise built on GigaCenter cloud-ready infrastructure is truly a break through in performance, scalability and reliability", said Tim Dufour, president and CEO of RackForce.

ddsCloud Enterprise leverages virtualization and unified fabric to combine computing, network and storage into one seamless system. When compared with previous computing models RackForce has seen deployment times reduced by 85% and customer costs reduced by up to 30%.

RackForce's CIO Randall Robinson added, "ddsCloud Enterprise operated from the ultra green GigaCenter will have a carbon footprint that is 1/50th the size of other cloud offerings located in conventional North American data centers. We believe that when given a choice customers will choose green clouds over black clouds."

To demonstrate its confidence in its new offering RackForce's ddsCloud Enterprise is available with monthly contracts and billing. With longer term agreements RackForce offers 100% uptime guarantees on infrastructure and network.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is a leading provider of green dynamic datacenter services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its superior datacenter design, automated systems and virtualization expertise, RackForce provides next-generation scalable colocation, cloud computing, management and network services to a worldwide customer base. For more information, visit www.rackforce.com.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Brian Fry
Vice President, Sales and Marketing
RackForce Networks Inc.
(250) 448-2226

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that the Seattle University, Tele Sistemi Ferroviari, Moses Cone Health System, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and RackForce have selected the Cisco Unified Computing System™ to increase business agility and productivity, and scale their virtualized environments while reducing data center costs. These organizations join more than 400 enterprise and service provider customers around the world who have adopted the Cisco Unified Computing System since it began shipping just eight months ago in July 2009. Global customers include Curtin University in Australia, Winterflood Securities in the UK, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen in Austria, Incheon Metropolitan City in Korea,and Taser, Tutor Perini, Molina Healthcare, and Purdue University in the U.S.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that the Seattle University, Tele Sistemi Ferroviaria, Moses Cone Health System, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and RackForce have selected the Cisco Unified Computing System™ to increase business agility and productivity, and scale their virtualized environments while reducing data center costs. These organizations join more than 400 enterprise and service provider customers around the world who have adopted the Cisco Unified Computing System since it began shipping just eight months ago in July 2009. Global customers include Curtin University in Australia, Winterflood Securities in the UK, Klinikum Wels-Grieskirchen in Austria, Incheon Metropolitan City in Korea, and Taser, "Tutor Perini, Molina Healthcare and Purdue University in the U.S.

Facts

• The Cisco Unified Computing System unites computational, storage and network resources to create a virtualized data center computing platform that is optimized for high-performance application deployment, and is being adopted by organizations worldwide. Cisco® Data Center 3.0 solutions help data centers to transition to 10 Gigabit architectures, virtualization, unified fabric solutions, cloud computing and green operations.
• Cisco offers the broadest range of networked data center solutions in the industry, including the Cisco Unified Computing System™, Cisco Nexus® family of data center switches, Cisco MDS multiprotocol storage area network switches, Cisco application delivery products, and Cisco Catalyst Switches®.
• Cisco Services helps customers realize the full value of their Cisco Unified Computing System investment. Cisco Services provides planning, design, implementation, operation and optimization services, and has helped customers deploy Unified Computing System worldwide.
• The Cisco Data Center 3.0 portfolio now supports more than 15,000 applications through certifications and integration with key industry partners. Cisco Validated Designs and related professional services from Cisco and partners allow easy, dependable migration of critical IT systems to Data Center 3.0 infrastructure.

Seattle University: Unified Computing System Eases Management of Campus IT Services

Seattle University (SU) is the largest independent, multidisciplinary university in the Northwest, with 7,751 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs. Seattle University deployed the Cisco Unified Computing System and other related Cisco® technologies for networking and data center management. In addition, Seattle University worked closely with Cisco Services, along with a Cisco Gold Certified partner INX, to install and integrate the new technologies into its existing infrastructure.

Seattle University deployed the Cisco Unified Computing System to improve the 20 campus computer labs and over 1,500 desktop computers by synchronizing them on a uniform software program. The equipment, software, and network were difficult to upgrade because the original software package was manually installed and updated for specific academic courses through a time-intensive process. In many cases, each application required a dedicated server, even if the application used a small portion of the server's available central processing unit (CPU), wasting resources.

With the Cisco Unified Computing System, Seattle University IT staff can easily upgrade software and manage data center services centrally. "We are now managing open computers in 17 of the educational and administrative buildings, residence halls, and student areas on campus," says Daniel Duffy, chief technology officer for Seattle University. "We cut the number of people deploying software in multiple areas for specific classroom needs and requests. The Cisco Unified Computing System provides centralized management across campus to modernize our learning environment."

Moses Cone Health System: Unified Computing System Aids Transition to Electronic Medical Records

Based in North Carolina, Moses Cone Health System is a multihospital system that delivers extensive outpatient services.

In response to the U.S. economic stimulus program, Moses Cone Health System is accelerating its transition to electronic medical records (EMR) and Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE). To support EMR, the IT team is deploying Microsoft Amalga, a real-time data warehousing application designed for clinical data. To host Microsoft Amalga and to enable the clinical staff to use the application to view and update EMRs and access the System's radiology and lab systems, the Moses Cone Health System IT staff selected the Cisco Unified Computing System and partner Varrow to help in the deployment.

"We needed a cost-effective computing system that would enable us to expand our use of EMRs quickly over the next year, minimize network infrastructure build-out, and reduce time to rack and configure servers," says Michael Heil, manager of technology infrastructure, Moses Cone Health System. "It took less than 17 minutes for two of us to unbox, rack, power and cable up the Fibre Channel over Ethernet connections when we got our third chassis. The organization has also benefitted from lower costs and faster disaster recovery."

Heil adds, "Cisco Unified Computing System has given our organization more flexibility and greater business agility, establishing a solid foundation to meet changing healthcare industry demands. It's an exciting time to be in healthcare, and tools like the Cisco Unified Computing System are helping us move forward."

For the Moses Cone Health System deployment, Cisco Services provided planning and design services to identify and address business and technical considerations before implementation. During deployment the Cisco Services team provided knowledge transfer and gave the IT staff hands-on experience with Cisco UCS Manager.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong: Cisco Unified Computing System Provides Centralized Management, Scalability

Established in 1963, the Chinese University of Hong Kong is a comprehensive research university that recently selected Cisco Unified Computing System for its data center.

"The Cisco Unified Computing System offers a holistic solution to solve data center challenges by offering integrated management and the critical support necessary for scaling virtualization. By increasing the performance and scale of virtualized environments, this solution will help us to better serve our students, faculty and administrators," said Mr Philip Leung, director of Information Technology Services Centre, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

RackForce: Cisco Unified Computing System Allows for Rapid Provisioning of Services to Meet Customer Requirements

RackForce is a leading provider of green dynamic datacenter services in the heart of British Columbia, and is the first Canadian service provider to deploy the Cisco Unified Computing System. RackForce has selected Cisco's Data Center 3.0 solutions, including Cisco Nexus data center switches, MDS storage directors and the Cisco Unified Computing System to rapidly provision hosted and cloud services to its customer base.

"The Cisco Unified Computing System is groundbreaking technology that allows us to quickly provision virtualized services and adapt to changing market conditions to expand our business," said Tim Dufour, president of RackForce. "As a GreenStar Network provider, we also applaud the carbon footprint efficiencies offered by the Cisco Unified Computing System."

Links/URLs

• Cisco Unified Computing System Website
• Cisco Nexus Website
• Read "Cisco Data Center Networks" blog
• Read Moses Cone Health System Case Study
• View Moses Cone Health System Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf-9PZWyFPY
• Read Seattle University Case Study
• Read Tele Sistemi Ferroviari, TSF S.p.A. Case Study
• Cisco Services

Technorati Tags: Cisco, Storage Networking, Data Center, Data Center Switches, Application Delivery Networks, Servers, Unified Fabric, Fibre Channel Over Ethernet, FCoE, Services, Channel Partner

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Sierra Wireless selected IBM and Rackforce to host the offering at the recently built GigaCenter(TM) in Kelowna, British Columbia, a new generation of data center which guarantees security, scalability and high availability required by Machine-to-Machine customers to manage more and more wireless-connected devices in the field. Many data centers today are not capable of managing emerging applications and the growth of information being driven by the increasing number of people, places, and things being connected by the Internet every day. Smarter data centers such as the GigaCentre provide greater standardized control over how, where and when data center resources are used, to provide higher levels of service and reliability.

VANCOUVER, Feb. 4 - Sierra Wireless (NASDAQ: SWIR - TSX: SW), has signed a services contract with IBM to host a new services platform dedicated to its software as a service Machine-to-Machine offering (data communication between machines through wired or wireless networks). Under the terms of the agreement, IBM will provide data center collocation facilities and services to Sierra Wireless. In 2008, Sierra Wireless deployed its first platform in France to service the European market. Now it is expanding to support its growth in North America and guarantee stable, secure and worldwide service coverage to its Machine-to-Machine customer base.

Sierra Wireless Solutions and Services provides a truly unique offering to manage any remote equipment, ranging from device management to asset data management based on a comprehensive M2M Services Platform. These hosted and operated machine-to-machine solutions dedicated to operators, device manufacturers and system integrators, have to be supported by an efficient and scalable infrastructure.

Sierra Wireless selected IBM and Rackforce to host the offering at the recently built GigaCenter(TM) in Kelowna, British Columbia, a new generation of data center which guarantees security, scalability and high availability required by Machine-to-Machine customers to manage more and more wireless-connected devices in the field. Many data centers today are not capable of managing emerging applications and the growth of information being driven by the increasing number of people, places, and things being connected by the Internet every day. Smarter data centers such as the GigaCentre provide greater standardized control over how, where and when data center resources are used, to provide higher levels of service and reliability.

"We have been looking for a North American hosting service to grow with our business and provide the highest level of services to our M2M customers," says Emmanuel Walckenaer Senior Vice President and General Manager of Sierra Wireless Solutions & Services. "The GigaCenter(TM) provides flexible space options, metered scalable power, 24/7 remote support, custom security and remote backup. It is perfectly adapted to cover large-scale deployments of machine-to-machine applications and exponential growth of wireless connected devices."

The state-of-the-art GigaCenter(TM) is among the greenest and most advanced data centers in the world, using a scalable and highly efficient modular design. Tapping into British Columbia's abundant supply of clean hydroelectric power, the GigaCenter produces less than 1/50th the carbon footprint of conventional data centers powered by coal-fired or natural gas electrical generation plants.

For more information about the Sierra Wireless Solutions & Services offering, please visit http://www.sierrawireless.com/solutions&services. To contact the Sierra Wireless Solutions & Services Sales Desk, e-mail solution-sales@sierrawireless.com.

About Sierra Wireless

Sierra Wireless (NASDAQ: SWIR - TSX: SW) products connect people and machines to wireless networks around the world. We offer an advanced, comprehensive product line, addressing consumer, enterprise, original equipment manufacturer, and specialized vertical industry markets. We also offer a wide range of professional and operated services. Our solutions are used for mobile computing, transportation, industrial M2M (machine-to-machine), enterprise, residential and consumer communications applications. For more information about Sierra Wireless, visit www.sierrawireless.com.

Product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things, plans and timing for the introduction or enhancement of our services and products, statements about future market conditions, supply conditions, channel and end customer demand conditions, revenues, gross margins, operating expenses, profits, and other expectations, intentions, and plans contained in this press release that are not historical fact. Our expectations regarding future revenues and earnings depend in part upon our ability to successfully develop, manufacture, and supply products that we do not produce today and that meet defined specifications. When used in this press release, the words "plan", "expect", "believe", and similar expressions generally identify forward-looking statements. These statements reflect our current expectations. They are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, changes in technology and changes in the wireless data communications market. In light of the many risks and uncertainties surrounding the wireless data communications market, you should understand that we cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements contained in this press release will be realized.

SOURCE Sierra Wireless, Inc.

EthicsPoint selected the Canadian RackForce data center in Kelowna, British Columbia as the location for this data center. The facility, which first opened in July 2009, has been recognized as one of the greenest and most advanced data centers in North America. It leverages state-of-the-art server hardware and virtualization to minimize energy consumption. Its power comes from Renewable Hydro Power with an extremely low CO2/kWh footprint -- 1/100th of coal fired electrical generation.

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - December 22, 2009) - EthicsPoint, the global authority in integrated hotline and case management services, today announced that it has established an international data center in order to meet growing demand for its software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based offerings for governance, risk and compliance programs. This investment makes EthicsPoint the first hotline and case management vendor with a data center outside the United States.

Meeting Client Needs Globally

The new international data center is part of EthicsPoint's strategic growth plan and the company's continued commitment to addressing customer needs. Currently, EthicsPoint has over 2,300 clients; approximately 40 percent of which have international operations. With demand from organizations headquartered outside of the United States growing, the new data center enables EthicsPoint to better meet the needs of existing and prospective customers with specialized data protection and data privacy demands. For example, the new facility will provide access to a data-privacy-approved location in compliance with the Article 29 Working Party of the European Union.

"The decision to build our new international data center reflects our increasingly diverse global customer base," said David Childers, CEO of EthicsPoint. "This data center will not only allow us to scale to provide reliable and secure on-demand delivery for our clients while addressing their data privacy concerns, but also reflects our strong commitment to protecting Earth's natural resources by implementing sustainable practices throughout our business."

Supporting Sustainable Business Goals

EthicsPoint selected the Canadian RackForce data center in Kelowna, British Columbia as the location for this data center. The facility, which first opened in July 2009, has been recognized as one of the greenest and most advanced data centers in North America. It leverages state-of-the-art server hardware and virtualization to minimize energy consumption. Its power comes from Renewable Hydro Power with an extremely low CO2/kWh footprint -- 1/100th of coal fired electrical generation.

EthicsPoint's application system currently processes an average of more than 100,000 transactions per day with greater than 99 percent system uptime and sub-second average server response time. The expanded storage and processing capacity will help meet current and projected user needs for availability, responsiveness and security.

About EthicsPoint

EthicsPoint enables organizations to foster a business culture of integrity and compliance. We help our clients protect their culture and reputation by facilitating the reporting and identification of issues and events of behavior that may be inconsistent with their code of conduct, to the subsequent investigation and resolution of these cases. Over 2,300 organizations use our telephone hotline, web-based reporting and case management services as a critical component of their overall governance, risk and compliance efforts.

For more information, visit www.ethicspoint.com.

Copyright 2009 EthicsPoint, Inc. EthicsPoint and the EthicsPoint logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of EthicsPoint, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Kelowna, B.C. - RackForce Networks Inc. is pleased to announce an agreement with Burnaby based RCR Technologies to act as a strategic reseller. Together RCR and RackForce can provide cost-effective and scalable data replication and disaster recovery services for companies of any size. RCR supplies the expertise, equipment and support, and RackForce supplies the best-in-class datacenter and high speed network, so that the client can focus on their core business.

Kelowna, B.C. - RackForce Networks Inc. is pleased to announce an agreement with Burnaby based RCR Technologies to act as a strategic reseller. Together RCR and RackForce can provide cost-effective and scalable data replication and disaster recovery services for companies of any size. RCR supplies the expertise, equipment and support, and RackForce supplies the best-in-class datacenter and high speed network, so that the client can focus on their core business.

RackForce's Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Brian Fry, says that "RackForce is pleased to be working with RCR, because their expertise combined with the capabilities of the new RackForce GigaCenter™ offers clients a badly needed disaster recovery solution right here in British Columbia."

RCR offers its clients the benefits of their extensive knowledge of server virtualization and data storage solutions. They provide best practice implementation for server hardware, operations and back-up recovery. The Kelowna-based RackForce GigaCenter™ was built to be among the greenest and most advanced data centers in North America. Using a scalable and highly efficient modular design, the GigaCenter™ supports demanding next-generation IT systems.

Together, RCR and RackForce offer full disaster recovery solutions. The first step in disaster recovery is data replication. RCR's equipment and expertise allow clients to maintain a second copy of their data at the RackForce GigaCenter™. If clients need to access their data, it is readily available.

The second step in disaster recovery is to provide for continuous availability of business-essential applications. Once businesses have established a second secure location for their data, they need to consider how to access the applications they need to operate, should their primary system become unavailable. RCR makes it easy for businesses to run another instance of applications on equipment that is secured at the RackForce GigaCenter™. Should the client's primary systems become unavailable, they can continue to operate using the applications and data that are housed in Kelowna.

Rob Rutherford, President, RCR Technologies, says that "we have teamed up with RackForce because their datacenter allows us to provide seamless disaster recovery solutions in a secure and sustainable facility that has the resources to support our clients' needs today and tomorrow."

Kelowna has been identified as one of the best locations in North America to build a data center because of its seismically stable geographic location, temperate climate and extremely low risk of natural disaster. It is an ideal location for disaster recovery and colocation solutions.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is a leading provider of green dynamic datacenter services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its superior datacenter design, automated systems and virtualization expertise, RackForce provides next-generation scalable colocation, computing resources, management and network services to a worldwide customer base. For more information, visit www.rackforce.com.

About RCR Technologies Inc.

RCR Technologies Inc is redefining business continuity by making it easier to implement off-site data replication and complete disaster recovery solutions. Powered by easy to manage software, virtualization and computer hardware, business executives will be confident their companies can continue to operate through any type of disruption.

RCR Technologies Inc is a trusted IT company for your organization's datacenter requirements. Contact RCR Technologies at sales@rcrtechnologies.com or visit www.rcrtechnologies.com for more information.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Brian Fry
Co-founder & Vice President, Sales and Marketing
RackForce Networks Inc.
Direct: 250-448-2226
Mobile: 250-512-1297
bfry@rackforce.com

Rob Rutherford
President, RCR Technologies
Direct: 604-298-4488 ext 3001
rob@rcrtechnologies.com

Kelowna, B.C. - RackForce Networks Inc. has launched ddsCloud, its best in class cloud computing solution. ddsCloud provides dynamic and scalable server resources for small businesses to enterprise class. Building on RackForce's years of experience providing Dynamic Datacenter Services, ddsCloud offers processing, storage and networking services with flexible allocation. Starting at $99 per month, ddsCloud provides high-availability and unmetered service up to 100 Mbps. The pricing model is predictable and easy to manage. With ddsCloud, businesses are prepared for peak demand, can grow with ease, and choose simple, cost-effective green IT.

Kelowna, B.C. - RackForce Networks Inc. has launched ddsCloud, its best in class cloud computing solution. ddsCloud provides dynamic and scalable server resources for small businesses to enterprise class. Building on RackForce's years of experience providing Dynamic Datacenter Services, ddsCloud offers processing, storage and networking services with flexible allocation. Starting at $99 per month, ddsCloud provides high-availability and unmetered service up to 100 Mbps. The pricing model is predictable and easy to manage. With ddsCloud, businesses are prepared for peak demand, can grow with ease, and choose simple, cost-effective green IT.

ddsCloud is a unique solution that allows businesses to dynamically and independently add computing resources. Within our robust "cloud computing" environment, clients choose the combination of memory (RAM), processing power (CPU) and data storage that allow their businesses to operate most efficiently; each type of resource is available independently of the others. At some point, most businesses will need more memory (or perhaps more processing power or data storage - it all depends on the business). With other solutions, to add resources, physical changes need to be made to a server. With the ddsCloud, resources are dynamically reallocated to a client's cloud.

RackForce Co-Founder and CEO Tim Dufour says that "the ddsCloud is the obvious progression of RackForce's vision, which is to build highly scalable and flexible computing environments on top of green dynamic datacenter services. We are proud to provide a premium level of cloud computing at an accessible price point."

The ddsCloud is a green IT solution. Cloud computing uses virtualization technologies to efficiently allocate server resources; therefore, fewer servers are needed to deliver the same services, and less electricity is required to run and cool the servers. As well, our energy-efficient datacenters are designed to operate with a substantially reduced carbon footprint. By designing highly-efficient datacenters, by using the Canadian climate for cooling, and by choosing renewable green hydro power, a server in our facilities produces 1/20^th of the greenhouse gases produced by the exact same server located at a typical competitor's datacenter.

The ddsCloud combines best-in-class virtualization technologies including MS Server 2008 R2 - Hyper V (Microsoft's Cloud Computing solution) with SAN-based storage, high availability (HA) clusters, a choice of Windows server operating systems and RackForce's Dynamic Datacenter Services.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is a leading provider of green dynamic datacenter services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its superior datacenter design, automated systems and virtualization expertise, RackForce provides next-generation scalable colocation, computing resources, management and network services to a worldwide customer base. For more information, visit www.rackforce.com.

To watch a short video on why RackForce is an environmental leader in data center design, click here.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Brian Fry
Co-founder & Vice President, Sales and Marketing
RackForce Networks Inc.
Direct: 250-448-2226
Mobile: 250-512-1297
bfry@rackforce.com

Do a Google search, upload a photograph, or send a short email. We do these things automatically at home or work every day, but how often do we consider the energy costs?

The hardware that makes possible the simplest internet tasks, including servers and the huge data centres that house them, are the growth engine of  information and communications technology (ICT). And the amount of energy these servers demand – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year – is a huge challenge facing this growing industry.

Rackforce introduces its GigaCenter to the media, the first step towards making the Kelowna data centre the largest in Canada.

Do a Google search, upload a photograph, or send a short email. We do these things automatically at home or work every day, but how often do we consider the energy costs?

The hardware that makes possible the simplest internet tasks, including servers and the huge data centres that house them, are the growth engine of  information and communications technology (ICT). And the amount of energy these servers demand – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year – is a huge challenge facing this growing industry.

"The ICT industry is a horrible mess and most people don't understand [the energy needs] behind it," says Brian Fry, sales and marketing manager of  Rackforce, which is planning to expand its Kelowna, B.C. 'GigaCenter" into Canada's largest data centre.  "A lot of people think, 'if I use computer program instead of flying out to meetings I'll  teleconference the meeting and save the environment.'

"But they haven't calculated what their service provider is doing behind the scenes to make sure they're not having a heavy impact on the environment."

Bigger is better, but efficient is best

Rackforce, which began by charging $60 a month for data services in 2002, now counts technology leader IBM as its biggest client. And to meet demand, RackForce has just opened an initial 30,000 square feet in what is planned to be a 150,000-square-foot  "GigaCenter" in Kelowna.

When the entire facility opens in two years, it will consume enough energy to power roughly 40,000 homes daily.

That's a lot of power, but Rackforce now claims the most efficient use of power among data centres in B.C. They're currently using their space to serve more than 2,400 business and individual clients, and they've chosen Kelowna in large part due to the availability of power produced not by coal – as is the case in so many other places – but by water. Here's what Rackforce has to say on their website:

"All of RackForce's datacenters are powered by hydro-electric energy, from the Columbia River, provided by two separate providers (BC Hydro and Fortis) via two separate grids for power redundancy. Diesel generators are used only as backup power sources in the unlikely event of a power interruption from both suppliers."

As B.C. grows, so does data centre load

In 2007, BC Hydro estimated that the total server and data centre load in the province was about 800 GW/h a year, based on B.C.'s population. And the forecast was for an annual growth rate of 14%.

That's the reason BC Hydro is offering businesses juicy financial incentives and tools under the Power Smart Partner Program's Data Centre and Server Initiative. And it's why Rackforce is planning to expand its Kelowna facility to 150,000 square feet. 

"With business taking off it requires a much larger capacity than we've ever had before," says Fry. "The business we're in is so necessary, but the other part that's happening is that if you're not big enough, you become inefficient.

"About 70% of data centres run on coal-fired generation, and that's our biggest contributor to greenhouse gas," he says.

 In B.C., Rackforce is avoiding using "dirty" power in favour of hydroelectric power, which also comes at a cost among the lowest for electricity in North America.

"In our business, power is typically our single largest cost, and in B.C. it's quite affordable," he says.

Data centres thrive on efficiency

Conserving energy is important to all businesses, but it's doubly important to data centres.

"Unlike many industries that can't move quickly, our industry is going through a revolution," says Fry. He says that Rackforce moves quickly to  conserve energy by upgrading inexpensive fibre-optic cables and using the gifts of Mother Nature.

According to a recent Wired magazine article, chilly Iceland is the ideal home for data centres. There, the cooling advantage is obvious, and  geothermal and hydroelectric power keep electricity costs down.

Here in Canada, Kelowna seems to be the ideal home for the industry, in part because it's seismically sound and not prone to flooding or extreme weather. And so far, the wildfires of 2009 have not approached the Gigacenter.

Fry estimates that Rackforce, using inexpensive hydro power, is able to limit its carbon footprint to one-twentieth of the average, traditional data centre.

"The facilities are designed so efficiently they can handle the heat for the summer," he says. "And eight months of the year it's cool enough that we don't have to pay for the electricity to do the chilling."

CHBC News from Kelowna shows first video of RackForce's new GigaCenter.

Kelowna, B.C. - RackForce Networks Inc. today officially opened the first phase of its new multimillion dollar state-of-the-art GigaCenter™ in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Built to be among the greenest and most advanced data centers in the world, using a scalable and highly efficient modular design, the GigaCenter™ will support demanding next-generation IT systems to a worldwide customer base.

Data centers in many areas around the world are powered by coal-fired or natural gas electrical generation plants, creating tremendous amounts of CO₂ emissions as a bi-product of their power consumption. Tapping into British Columbia's abundant supply of clean hydroelectric power, the RackForce GigaCenter will produce less than 1/50^th the carbon footprint compared to typical conventional data centers.

Kelowna, B.C. - RackForce Networks Inc. today officially opened the first phase of its new multimillion dollar state-of-the-art GigaCenter™ in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Built to be among the greenest and most advanced data centers in the world, using a scalable and highly efficient modular design, the GigaCenter™ will support demanding next-generation IT systems to a worldwide customer base.

Data centers in many areas around the world are powered by coal-fired or natural gas electrical generation plants, creating tremendous amounts of CO₂ emissions as a bi-product of their power consumption. Tapping into British Columbia's abundant supply of clean hydroelectric power, the RackForce GigaCenter will produce less than 1/50^th the carbon footprint compared to typical conventional data centers.

"We built the GigaCenter here in Kelowna because it's one of the most stable and eco-friendly areas in North America," said Tim Dufour, president and CEO of RackForce. "The highly advanced network and scalable infrastructure supports our customer's most demanding computing needs, today and in the future, while contributing to their corporate environmental goals."

Kelowna has been identified as one of the best locations in North America to build a data center because of its stable geographic location, temperate climate and extremely low risk of natural disaster. It's also easily accessed - Kelowna's international airport is well serviced with direct flights from most major cities including Vancouver, Calgary, Seattle and Toronto. The area's prevalent tourist industry also provides an abundance of amenities to support the corporate IT traveller.

This first phase of the GigaCenter encompasses 30,000 square feet. Customers can secure space in increments as small as a single cabinet, up to dedicated rooms (called GigaVaults) ranging in size from 12 to over 170 cabinets. An additional 120,000 square feet is scheduled to be complete in 2011, which will make RackForce's GigaCenter one of the largest service provider data centers in North America.

Built with IBM's data center expertise, the RackForce GigaCenter utilizes innovative design features to support both current and future technologies including massive data storage, high density blade servers, virtualized computing clusters and mainframe systems.

"We are proud to have been involved with RackForce on this exciting project," said John Ostrander, Vice-President of IBM Global Services. "The GigaCenter is a clear example of how Canadian companies continue to innovate and find new ways to improve global business practices, while reducing our impact on the environment."

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is a leading provider of green dynamic datacenter services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its superior datacenter design, automated systems and virtualization expertise, RackForce provides next-generation scalable colocation, computing resources, management and network services to a worldwide customer base. For more information, visit www.rackforce.com.

About IBM

For more information about IBM, go to www.ibm.com.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Trevor Boudreau
Wilcox Group on behalf of RackForce Networks Inc.
(604) 488-1100
tboudreau@wilcoxgroup.com

Joanne Fortin
IBM Communications - Canada
(514) 964-8558
Fortin@ca.ibm.com

The Okanagan is joining the technology big boys.

The Okanagan is joining the technology big boys.

A data centre of mind-boggling size, capacity and importance, called RackForce GigaCenter, is set to open July 15 in Kelowna to much fanfare - and questions.

Brian Fry, vice-president of sales and marketing at RackForce Networks

Such as: What is a GigaCenter?

"It's a secure place that houses all the racks that hold all the servers that hold all the websites and applications," said RackForce vice-president Brian Fry.

"It also provides all-important backup storage and disaster recovery."

To put into perspective how massive this GigaCenter is, imagine a wide-open space of 150,000 square feet (as big as a Wal-Mart) filled with row upon row of racks (thus RackForce's name) that hold the servers that run websites and computer applications and store data.

A total of 2,860 two-foot-by-three-foot racks that hold 40 servers each will be stacked two high and enclosed.

That adds up to 114,000 servers.

Each server can run or hold 1,000 websites, applications and/or data units for a capacity of 114 million applications.

The infrastructure and equipment cost is estimated to be $75 million, but the ripple effect could hit billions when one considers the value of all the websites, applications and data stored and backed up.

It all makes the GigaCenter the biggest data centre in Canada, outpacing Q9 in Toronto.

"This makes Kelowna an incredible hub of technology," said Fry.

"Almost everything we do, whether we know it or not, is run out of a data centre. This has already brought advanced people and applications to Kelowna, and it will only build and build and build from now. This is the anchor tenant for the entire Okanagan technology industry."

This centre is at 2130 Leckie Place, one of the newer buildings to the side of the former Western Star Trucks factory on Enterprise Way.

Initially, 30,000 square feet and 572 racks of servers will open July 15, with the entire 150,000, 2,860-rack capacity being hit in 2011 with new construction to house the rapid expansion.

Why Kelowna?

"IBM (the giant multinational computer company that's the marketing and sales partner in the GigaCenter) identified RackForce and the Okanagan on its own," said Fry.

"We already have established data centres here (2,700 servers in the basements of two of the Landmark office buildings in Kelowna hosting applications from 100 countries around the world), and the Okanagan fits the stability profile."

For global customers who want to make sure their websites and applications run, and for companies, governments and militaries that want to make sure their data is backed up, a stable location is necessary.

Kelowna fits the bill because it has an abundant supply of clean and cheap hydroelectric power to run the GigaCenter, and the city is in a country that doesn't pose much of a threat for terrorism, coups, civil unrest or lawlessness.

As well, the Okanagan is stable geographically, with little threat of earthquake, flood or other natural disaster.

"This really puts the Okanagan on the tech map," said Okanagan Science and Technology Council executive director Douglas MacLeod.

"This is the first of this scale, magnitude and innovation in the Valley. It's so significant for its capacity and its greenness."

The GigaCenter also uses some of the latest environmentally friendly technology. Its next-generation, high-density servers are at least 30 per cent more energy-efficient than regular servers.

While in operation, servers create heat, which will be captured and put into Kelowna's power grid for use elsewhere in the city.

As well, GigaCenter has come up with a new system to operate servers in an environment of 20 C, rather than 18 C, thus reducing its air-conditioning demand.

With the world moving to virtually all information on computers, there's insatiable demand for data centres.

With IBM's help as marketer and sales representative, the RackForce GigaCenter is well-positioned to fill up quickly with high-quality clients from around the world.

Ironically, while such a big and important operation, the GigaCenter won't create a lot of jobs.

RackForce currently has 28 employees at its head office in the Landmark IV building, and it expects to double in size when it adds all the technical, administrative and security staff needed for the GigaCenter.

RackForce started in 2001 when Tim Dufour and Brian Fry of Rossland brought their tech backgrounds together to set up the first data centres in the basements of the Landmark buildings.

Since then, Jerry Caul of Kelowna and a Kelowna investment company called B.C. Trust have come on board as co-owners.

A new generation of energy-hungry data centres is taking root in B.C.'s Interior as more businesses outsource software duties and hardware to service providers in the Internet "cloud".

A new generation of energy-hungry data centres is taking root in B.C.'s Interior as more businesses outsource software duties and hardware to service providers in the Internet "cloud".

New innovations and technologies are improving data centre efficiency, but some industry veterans and experts say that data centers, which remain major consumers of power, are still far from efficient.

Data centres are often marketed as green alternatives because they consolidate Internet products and infrastructure.

Brian Fry, vice-president of sales and marketing at RackForce Networks: pitching the company's hydro-powered data centre in Kelowna as a green alternative to coal-powered facilities in the U.S.

But, according to Brian Fry, vice-president of sales and marketing at Kelowna-based data centre operator RackForce Networks, in many cases their green branding is inaccurate.

This month RackForce, in a partnership with IBM Corp., opened an initial 30,000 square feet in a 150,000-square-foot "gigacentre" in Kelowna.

When the entire facility opens in two-to-three years, it will consume a daily diet of 40 megawatts, which is enough energy to power roughly 40,000 homes.

Nonetheless, Fry said that it will be one of the most efficient facilities of its kind.

"Everybody is going to claim to be green, but I challenge just about any company to be greener than what this facility will be."

A small number of aging data centres still hum away throughout B.C.

Telus Corp. (TSX:T;NYSE:TU) has run two in Burnaby and Victoria for more than 20 years; the British Columbia Lottery Corp. (BCLC) has operated data centres in Kamloops and Richmond since 1985 and 1988.

Telus wouldn't disclose how much energy its data centres consume annually.

But a BCLC rep said the annual energy consumption of the Crown corporations's Kamloops facility is 2.89 million kilowatt hours (KW/h); its Richmond facility consumes 350,000 KW/h.

At $0.055/KW, the BCLC's energy bill for the two facilities is approximately $180,000 a year.

The power use effectiveness (PUE) at its data centres is 2.2 and 2.0.

Telus' centres have a similar PUE. The standard data centre efficiency measurement is calculated by dividing a centre's energy consumption by the consumption of its computer infrastructure.

A PUE of 3.0 is considered, by today's standards, inefficient, while a PUE of 1.0 is impossibly efficient.

BC Hydro spokeswoman Simi Heer notes that, while new technologies and innovations are reducing the PUE of data centres, newer centres remain heavy energy consumers.

And with data centres being built larger than ever, reducing their PUE has become a major concern for building managers.

Using figures produced in a report to the United States Congress in 2007, BC Hydro estimates that the total server and data centre load in the province is about 800 GW/h a year, based on B.C.'s population.

The provincial government has projected that virtualization and other efficiencies will reduce the power consumption of its planned data centre in Kelowna by approximately 50%.

BC Hydro eliminated 292 servers and saved $61,000 in energy costs in its data centre network last year through server virtualization.

A Telus rep said the company has improved its data centres' PUE by 10% to 15% by upgrading cooling systems and older servers and virtualizing servers.

The vancouver-based telecom is one of several organizations drawing up blueprints for new data centres in B.C. cities in the Interior like Kelowna and Kamloops.

The region's main appeal to data centre operators is the cheap hydro power supplied by the Columbia River and its tributaries.

Not far south of the border, Microsoft Corp., Google, and Yahoo Inc. operate data centres near Columbia River-fed dams.

Telus plans to move some of its more energy-hungry web applications - such as billing and managed e-mail services - from its less efficient data centers to its new facility, the location of which has been short-listed but not selected.

Engineers at IBM designed RackForce's facility to have a PUE of 1.38.

Fry noted that most U.S.-based data centres are powered by coal-fired power plants.

"It makes so much sense to move servers out of those [coal-powered] data-centres and into these new cleaner data centres," he said.

RackForce is compartmentalizing - or boxing - server racks to concentrate and independently control the cooling of each series of racks.

In winter, when the temperature drops, outside air will replace electricity to cool servers.

Fry said RackForce never negotiated an exclusive rate with energy-provider FortisBC, but he added that the company is paying one of the lowest energy rates in North America.

Robert Miggins, vice-president of business development at Peer 1 Network Enterprises Inc. (TSX-V:PIX), said power supply is usually the first consideration when considering data centre expansion.

"It's not necessarily what it costs to expand square footage," said Miggins. "Sometime you will run out of power before square footage."

Vancouver-based Peer 1 opened a data centre in the United Kingdom in April and has announced plans for a new centre in Toronto.

The company is aiming to maintain a sub-2.0 PUE rating at the new facilities.

RackForce has partnered with CANARIE Inc. and the Information Technology Association of Canada to develop best practices for reducing power consumption and the environmental impact of data centres.

Said Fry: "Once it's measured, we would like to stand up on the soapbox and say, 'It's time that our industry got its act together, and this is how you do it."

Is your organization ready for cap and trade? While it's all well and good to build as "green" as possible, data centre operators need to ensure their operations are economically viable as well.

Is your organization ready for cap and trade? While it's all well and good to build as "green" as possible, data centre operators need to ensure their operations are economically viable as well.

Industry observers say data centre owners - and their customers - have to pay attention to where the data centre's power comes from if they really want to walk the line between environmental and financial responsibility.

"Most of the time when you're seeing a green story, it's going be talking about efficiency," says Brian Fry, co-founder and vice-president of sales and marketing at RackForce Networks Inc in Kelowna, B.C. "But look out the back, follow the power lines to the power source, and you'd be surprised."

The power source is the lynchpin, he says. It's great news if your servers run efficiently, and your heating and cooling systems are state of the art - but if they're powered by, say, a coal-fired generating station, how green is that? It isn't necessarily better for the environment - and it could put a big dent in the corporate pocketbook as well.

Bill St. Arnaud is a member of Telemanagement's advisory board and the chief research officer of CANARIE Inc, Canada's advanced research network headquartered in Ottawa. He sees a shift towards power-source scrutiny, both in terms of environmental and economic prudence.

The major concern: emerging cap and trade energy polices. "Many companies are not aware of the consequences," says Arnaud.

It's something the US government is seriously considering. Canadian administrators will probably follow suit, St. Arnaud figures. Cap and trade would force companies to operate below a certain environmental threshold - the amount of carbon dioxide their operations emit would have to be lower than a particular level. Companies producing more than the permitted cap would have to purchase credits from businesses producing less than the maximum carbon dioxide amount. That's the "trade" part of the equation.

What does it all mean for data centre operators? Unless they look forward to shelling out big bucks for credits, they'll need to make sure their power comes from relatively low-carbon sources, such as renewable hydro-electric systems and wind farms.

And that's just stage one. Stage two: higher green energy prices. As companies scramble to secure contracts with hydro companies and solar power providers, you can bet prices for these environmentally friendly services will skyrocket.

What's a data centre operator to do? "Get off the grid ASAP," St. Arnaud says. "It's the only way you can really be certain of your cost of power over the next 20 years."

This is why some data centre operators are looking at old hydro electric stations and generators as strategic investments. If they can produce the power themselves, they'll avoid paying arms and legs to other providers. And if they happen to produce surplus power, it could be returned to the grid for a rebate or sold to other, not-so-forward-thinking businesses.

"The big companies understand this in spades," St. Arnaud says.

Smaller firms step up

But the big companies aren't the only ones concerned about dollars and environmental sense. RackForce, for instance, is all about the green. In July the 27-person company plans to open its first eco-friendly GigaCenter data centre.

Powered by the nearby Columbia River via electricity provider Fortis, this Kelowna BC-located facility will sport "cold aisles" that concentrate the cooling effect of chillers and air conditioners for maximum efficiency. The warmer air that comes out the other side of the centre will be pumped on to help heat local condominium and office buildings. AC economizers will ensure cold air is drawn from outside if the temperature drops below 10 degrees Celsius. Proximity to the main power source - the river generators - helps reduce power-line loss as the electricity travels from the service provider to the data centre.

RackForce is building incrementally, starting with 30,000 square feet with the ability to scale up to 150,000 square feet. This also aids efficiency, because less space spells less heating and air-conditioning required.

Targeting the US as well as Canadian and European customers, RackForce could be well positioned to capitalize on a cap-and-trade system. The firm not only wants to host end-user organizations' computer resources, but it also wants to support other data centres looking to augment their own platforms.

Data centre expertise could be Canada's way out of its hewers-of-wood, drawers-of-water economy. "We need to look at renewable power as valuable as a raw log," Fry says, arguing that Canada could turn this into something more than a basic resource. "We could be the major provider of data centre and IT services."

Fry says the trick is to concentrate Canada's data centres in places that have access to green energy - hydro, for instance, is plentiful along the Columbia River in BC, and in Manitoba and Quebec.

But does that mean places like Nova Scotia, which draws plenty of power from coal, would be left out of the loop? Not necessarily. St. Arnaud mentions Bastionhost Ltd, which is creating data centres in Nova Scotia using wind and tidal energy to power the facilities. Businesses have choices.

"If companies don't take precautions in Nova Scotia, they will be very dirty," St. Arnaud says. And with cap and trade coming, "you'd price yourself right out of the market."

Price is a perpetual sticking point. But technology has an answer: virtualization. You might be hard pressed to find a data centre in North America not using or planning to use it. Virtualization transforms servers into services and essentially chops the hardware requirement, reducing the power need. But it isn't without its hazards. If data centre operators aren't careful, they could find that this energy-saving system ends up costing them in other ways.

"The pitfalls are the same as they'd be for any sizable new project," says Grant Aitken, Toronto-based area VP for VMware Inc, a software company specializing in virtualization. "If you don't plan well, don't train and don't predict the change-management issues, those are the things that are going to bite you."

VMware teams up with other companies to help keep those bites at bay. "We have partners that will go in and do a study," Aitken says. "Whether they're looking at environmental issues - that's usually an element of it, but it's not the only piece." Capital cost avoidance plays a large part as well.

"It may be the poor man's way, but we actually have an ROI tool on our website that any customer can use. If they have extremely detailed data, they can modify the default details," such as the power rates, which are set for a US average, not a Canadian average.

But it's relatively time consuming. "Somebody has to go and get those data points."

The Jevons Effect

Fry from RackForce points to the Jevons Effect as one consideration: the more efficient the technology, the more it's used. "The dilemma with virtualization is it's so easy to create servers, you end up with server sprawl."

Planning and management are important. And it's crucial to consider the physical space for the hardware as well, even if it is somewhat smaller than would have been required in a non-virtualized system. "Virtualization is an awesome idea but you need the data centre underneath to support it," Fry says.

Most industry observers agree that virtualization is a good first step towards a green data centre - but it's only one item on the environmental to-do list. If companies don't pay attention to other energy savers, and if they ignore where, exactly, their power comes from, "you might as well take a brush and paint a green stripe on your PC," St. Arnaud says.

CANARIE is leading the green charge with a $3-million call for proposals for computing and network technologies that reduce carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. Launched in June, the CANARIE Green IT Pilot Program has two objectives: to test the technical viability and usability of relocating computers and clouds to zero-carbon data centres and follow the sun/follow the wind grid; and to test the business case viability of offering carbon offsets (and/or equivalent services) to universities who reduce their carbon footprint by relocating computers and instrumentation to zero-carbon data centre. CANARIE expects to hand out $2 million for major data centre pilot projects and $1 million for developing business cases and smaller projects.

The deadline for the call for proposals (June 29) may have come and gone by the time this reaches article publication, but there are plenty of other things for data centre operators to consider. One simple tool may be the least-mentioned of the three "R's" of sustainability (reduce, reuse, recycle): reuse. It can be difficult to see the benefits of reusing old servers through the greenwash of new technologies purporting to save energy.

St. Arnaud says many data centre operators already reuse as much as possible, moving former state-of-the-art boxes down the line to support less critical applications. "It's only when servers get to be a decade old that they throw them into the recycling pile."

Aitken says older technology can only take you so far in a virtualized environment. Last-gen servers weren't designed for virtual systems. "You might be limiting the ratios you can pull, because you're going to run into bottlenecks," like memory and IO.

Sometimes it's best to break off ties with earlier technologies. That's what RackForce is doing. The company is shutting down one of its older data centres, because beside the green GigaCenter, it's relatively expensive to run and it lacks efficient designs such as cold aisles. "Back then, you'd take an open space and push a bunch of cold air into it," Fry says. "You end up with hot spots."

But the data centre in question isn't exactly ancient. It was built in 2001. Still, over the years, RackForce has worked with IBM Corp's Big Green engineering and consulting team to develop a practical formula for green data centre operation. "I think we're going to be the greenest data centre on the planet," Fry says.

Virtualization is no longer a concept merely pondered by IT departments. Instead, it's a strategy - one in which Canadian companies are fully investing. A September 2008 study of the Canadian enterprise market by IDC Canada found that 33 per cent of servers are already running in a virtualized environment and 40 per cent of companies plan to deploy virtualization at some point over the next 12 months.

Virtualization is no longer a concept merely pondered by IT departments. Instead, it's a strategy - one in which Canadian companies are fully investing. A September 2008 study of the Canadian enterprise market by IDC Canada found that 33 per cent of servers are already running in a virtualized environment and 40 per cent of companies plan to deploy virtualization at some point over the next 12 months.

That data should come as little surprise, given the potential cost savings, productivity and return-on-investment benefits of virtualization. These include a reduction in server room cooling costs, optimized server capabilities and the ability to forge stronger disaster recovery plans due to the quick restoration times made possible by a virtualized environment.

Managing an infrastructure in which physical and virtual servers co-exist, however, is not without challenges; a smooth transition to a virtualized environment requires careful upfront planning. To lay the groundwork, IT managers need to determine the exact usage requirements for each physical server and, because usage rates fluctuate throughout the day, they also require a mechanism to track the changing workloads. Management tools can help with this tracking, as well as identifying inefficient servers and acting as an extra set of eyes to help users proactively spot problems before they affect daily operations.

This level of insight into the server room is critical to any virtualization plan. Without it, companies run the risk of "virtual machine sprawl," where an excess of virtual machines actually add needless complexity to the IT environment.

Management In Action

To be truly effective, management solutions should be part of the initial discussion when all stakeholders are at the table. One organization that successfully followed this process is RackForce Networks Inc., a Kelowna-based hosting service provider. RackForce was the first hosting service provider to bring Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2 to market, and this early entry into virtualization allowed the company to understand some of the associated challenges, including how best to monitor and maintain a virtual and physical server environment while managing patch updates and application deployment.

Taking advantage of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM), IT staff at RackForce gained better visibility into the company's infrastructure, getting the insight they needed to make the necessary changes to physical and virtualized server loads as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

This has helped RackForce better manage its internal systems and support its clients. Today, RackForce manages an average of four customer systems per physical server, far more efficient than the one-to-one customer per physical server model previously supported.

Greater Server Capacity

Improved client service was another unexpected bonus. The company receives hundreds of customer calls per day and the support team spent much of its time manually logging into servers to resolve issues. The team would also have to copy multiple gigabyte images between servers and configure each client's virtual environment through the Virtual Server Web interface.

With VMM, the IT team can automate this task and easily identify which server has capacity for additional workloads, allowing them to configure them as necessary.

The bottom line, however, is that virtualization can indeed lower server costs and reduce sprawl if all factors are considered and planned from the outset. With a deeper understanding of the proper balance between virtualization and management tools, business today are positioned to realize the promised cost and productivity benefits.

June 1, 2009 (OTTAWA, Ontario) - CANARIE today announced a $3 million Call for Proposals to fuel the development of advanced computing and networking technologies that reduce carbon and greenhouse gas emissions from the world's Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) infrastructure (including computer hardware, software and networks), and enable collaboration on promising green IT solutions that will help slow the rate of global warming.

June 1, 2009 (OTTAWA, Ontario) - CANARIE today announced a $3 million Call for Proposals to fuel the development of advanced computing and networking technologies that reduce carbon and greenhouse gas emissions from the world's Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) infrastructure (including computer hardware, software and networks), and enable collaboration on promising green IT solutions that will help slow the rate of global warming.

The CANARIE Green IT Pilot Program will help Canadian innovators to capitalize on emerging opportunities in Green ICT - a global market that, according to Insight Research Corporation, is expected to reach over US $600 billion by 2013. Specifically, it aims to facilitate national and international collaborative research projects that demonstrate the

• technical feasibility and usability of relocating computers and other cyber infrastructure to zero-carbon data centers that are connected by optical networks, and powered solely by renewable energy sources such as the sun or the wind, and
• business case for providing carbon offsets (and/or equivalent services) to university researchers and IT personnel who reduce their carbon footprint by relocating computers and instrumentation to zero-carbon data centers

CANARIE expects to award up to $2 million for major zero-carbon data center pilot projects; and about $1 million for the development of business cases and smaller projects. The outcomes of this pilot project could influence the development of 'Canadian-designed' green ICT approaches, products and services that could be marketed around the world. As countries such as the United States, Britain, Singapore and Australia consider injecting billions of dollars into green and broadband strategies, these initiatives could help put Canada 'in the global game', stimulating business development opportunities and opening new markets for Canadian companies.

"This Call for Proposals aims to capitalize on Canada's expertise in ICT and the development and use of advanced networks to accelerate the adoption of low-carbon ICT infrastructure and management strategies," said Guy Bujold, President and CEO of CANARIE. "It will enable innovators to collaborate on the development and validation of novel green technologies, assess the feasibility of zero-carbon data centres, and propose cost-effective and environmentally sound IT strategies that could benefit companies in many sectors. This reinforces CANARIE's commitment to partner with industry, academia and government to address global sustainability challenges such as climate change."

"This Call for Proposals underscores CANARIE's critical role as a change agent in the ICT landscape", said Brian Fry, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing for RackForce, a leader green datacenters based in Kelowna, BC. "It will provide enormous lift for companies such as RackForce that aim to develop, implement and promote the use of green data centers to reduce our carbon footprint. For example, winning project teams could influence the development of new standards, discover new ways to optimize zero-carbon data centers, and help to stimulate increased uptake of green ICT approaches. This represents a win for industry - and for society."

The deadline for initial proposals is June 29, 2009 at 5PM EDT, with full applications to be submitted by September 10, 2009 at 5PM EDT. Selected proposals will be announced in October 2009. For additional information on this program, please visit: http://www.canarie.ca/funding/greenit/call_for_proposals.html

Quick Facts: Green ICT

Green ICT is the study and practice of using computers and telecommunications in a way that maximizes positive environmental benefit and minimizes the negative impact of carbon (Australian Computer Society)

It is estimated that:

• The ICT industry alone produces carbon emissions that are equivalent to the carbon output of the entire aviation industry (An Inefficient Truth, Global Action Plan, 2007)
• One small computer server generates as much carbon dioxide as an SUV with a fuel efficiency of 15 miles per gallon (An Inefficient Truth, Global Action Plan, 2007)
• A typical US university produces up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon per year, of which up to 300,000 tons is generated from cyber infrastructure and ICT (EDUCAUSE)
• The ICT industry has the potential to reduce current global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 30% (Smart 2020)
• Green ICT could help to save the global industry US $800 billion in annual energy costs by 2020 (Smart 2020)

About CANARIE

CANARIE Inc., based in Ottawa, is Canada's advanced network organization. It facilitates the development and use of its network as well as the advanced products, applications and services that run on it. The CANARIE Network serves universities, colleges, schools, government labs, research institutes, hospitals and other organizations in a wide variety of fields in both the public and private sectors. By promoting and participating in strategic collaborations among key sectors, and by partnering with peer networks and organizations around the world, CANARIE Inc. stimulates and supports research, innovation and growth, bringing economic, social, and cultural benefits to Canadians. The national organization was created in 1993 by the private sector and academia under the leadership of the Government of Canada. CANARIE Inc. is supported by membership fees, with major funding of its programs and activities provided by the Government of Canada. For additional information, please visit: www.canarie.ca

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is a leading provider of green data center infrastructure and network services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its advanced data center design, automated systems and virtualization expertise it provides highly reliable On-Demand servers, collocation and connectivity to a world-wide customer base. For additional information, please visit: www.rackforce.com

With cooling systems eating up half your data centre dollars, it makes sense to slash your cooling costs any way you can. But can data centres use cold weather to their advantage? The case for, and against, free cooling

With cooling systems eating up half your data centre dollars, it makes sense to slash your cooling costs any way you can. But can data centres use cold weather to their advantage? The case for, and against, free cooling

Skyrocketing energy costs and the corporate world's need to go green have compelled many data centre administrators to begin looking at new ways to cut their cooling and power spending.

Of course, we've seen the meteoric rise of system virtualization and cloud computing as a response to this issue, and most of the IT industry has reached a consensus that these technologies are indeed a viable way to consolidate and save on energy costs.

New to the power-saving debate is the notion of free cooling. Some have speculated that cold-weather countries like Canada might offer an advantage in what analysts will agree is one of the most expensive aspects of keeping a data centre up and running.

Some countries are even encouraging international businesses to consider setting up IT shops within their borders.

Last year, the Invest in Iceland Agency touted its country as one of the most competitive locations in the world for data centre operations. The country cited cheap and abundant power, low corporate taxes and an overall chilly climate as lures.But it's not as easy as simply opening up the windows and letting the cold air come in. Taking advantage of "free cooling" might actually take some time, effort, and money to achieve.

We talked to a variety of industry players about free cooling, how it fits in our increasingly cash-strapped IT organizations and whether or not the technology is an actual game-changer

The case for free cooling

According to recent data compiled by American Power Conversion Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Emerson Network Power, half of all data centre energy consumption goes to cooling systems.

Other sources have said that cooling often fits a one-to-one ratio. "For facilities cost, which is mostly cooling and energy costs, a company spends about one dollar on cooling for every one dollar it spends on computing," said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Research Inc.

With numbers like that, the benefits of cutting down on energy consumption is unquestionable. But, despite this opportunity, the idea of free cooling has not yet garnered much interest around the world.

"Not a lot of customers have taken an interest in free cooling because they really don't know about it yet," said Brian Fry, vice-president of sales and co-founder at RackForce Hosting Inc. of Kelowna, B.C. "There's a very small percentage of the world that even understands carbon footprints in the first place."

Fry's company has teamed up with IBM Corp. to construct a 150,000-square-foot green data centre in Kelowna. The Gigacentre, which opens this spring, will allow companies to rent out space in what RackForce is calling one of the most energy-efficient data centres in the world.

A key part of the new facility, Fry said, is its free cooling mechanism. "The chiller technology has enough intelligence to know that, once it gets below 10 degrees Celsius, it will automatically shut down the evaporative cooling systems - a technology used to evaporate water through cooling machines," he said. "It just starts to take the cold air from the outside, and filter it into the data centre. We don't have to use the normal chiller processes."

Fry said that, while a company might spend up to twice as much on the chiller systems to be able to harness the outside air, the savings can be seen fairly quickly and the technology will essentially pay for itself.

And, if new U.S. President Barack Obama has his way, he added, a world of carbon credits will boost the demand for free cooling.

“You’re going to have a substantially smaller carbon footprint,” Fry said. “In the next few years, when carbon credits become a part of Obama’s world — and hopefully Prime Minister Harper’s as well — the investment will pay off even more.

“If you have to buy a whole bunch of carbon credits, it’s going to cost a fortune to choose a location in Texas, Virginia or Alberta, because you’re going to have up to 100 times the carbon footprint in those places.”

One of the biggest arguments against building a data centre in a remote, cold-weather location is that “you won’t have the network up in those places,” Fry said. “But that’s really an old wives’ tale now,” he added. “You’ve got fibre networks that run just about everywhere. As long as you deal with redundant networks coming from two directions, and you put the right electronics on each end of that fibre, you can do just about anything.”

King agreed, saying that the availability of high throughput networking is so common now that proximity to company headquarters is not really an issue.

Darin Stahl, lead analyst with Info-Tech Research Group, added that, while many in the industry believe that the data centre “air-handling” market is now stagnant and has reached its peak, the truth is that huge efficiencies have been gained in recent years. “The average life span of a server room is between 10 and 15 years,” Stahl said. “During that time, equipment and technology will change two to three times.”

He said an air conditioning unit in a data centre 15 years ago would have a maximum heat removal capacity of seven watts per square foot. “But, today, it’s about 50 watts per square foot, and more high-end precision and balanced solutions can achieve up to 250 watts.”

Free cooling is just another redundant system that Canadian-based data centres might be able to take advantage of during a substantial portion of the year, he added.

Why you don’t need free cool to be cool

But companies will, however, have to carefully examine whether the technology will save more than it will cost.

“You’ll probably save some energy costs, but what you don’t really do is achieve a full offset,” Stahl said. “Because now you’ve got to introduce a whole bunch of other operating and power mechanisms before bringing the air into the data centre.”

In the case of data centres located around the Pacific west coast, Stahl said that unfiltered sea air can bring unacceptable levels of static and humidity into the data centre.

“The basic premise that you’re just going to open the windows and take advantage of cooling is (foolish),” he added. “We also don’t know the total cost of ownership and the kind of maintenance issues you’re going to see, because free cooling hasn’t been around that long.”

John Smith, vice-president at the Minneapolis, Minn.-based engineering consulting firm Michaud Cooley Erickson, said that companies with data centres in cold-weather climates would be wise to consider water-side economizers rather than air-side economizers.

“If you live in a milder climate, where you don’t have really dry winter conditions, air-side probably makes some sense,” he said. “In Minnesota, for example, it doesn’t, because the humidification costs would kill you. You are bringing in that cold dry air that you have to humidify.” The water-side economizer uses a both a cooling tower outside the building, and a shell-and-tube heat exchanger inside the facility. During the winter months, the system can provide water that’s chilled using outside air.

For the Minnesota area, installing a water-side economizer system for data centre cooling can potentially save an average of US$37 a year per usable kilowatt of IT electrical load, based on an average electrical rate of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour, Smith said. In a large data centre with usable IT electrical loads of over 10,000 kilowatts, this could result in a savings of around $370,000 per year.

“This yields a simple payback of less than three years for the required mechanical equipment,” he added. “Operating costs would be slightly higher for the water-side economizer system, due to the fact that there is more equipment to maintain.”

Not cool at all

Osama Arafat, chief executive officer at data centre hosting firm Q9 Networks Inc., said that free cooling represents good engineering practice, but he doesn’t believe the technology is truly a game-changer for the industry. “It’s not really something that’s going to dramatically alter the cost of your co-location or hosting,” he said.

Arafat said that he would always rank data centre location ahead of the climate itself, meaning that, while free cooling is a neat feature that can save companies a little bit of money, proximity to the customer takes precedence.

Because of this, trying to take advantage of free cooling year-round and building a data centre in an extremely remote location is extremely unwise, Arafat said. “The savings won’t justify doing something crazy like that just to utilize the free cooling feature a few extra months.” Telecommunications expenses alone could offset most of the savings, he said.

Stahl added that most of the customers he’s spoken with have demanded that their primary data centre be within 75 kilometres of their company headquarters.

In addition to maintenance costs, there’s the cost and potential impracticality of integrating free cooling into an existing building. “You need to have a building or a structure that’s conducive to doing that, and, obviously, if you’re not in a standalone building, it’s much more difficult to build this feature into your data centre,” Arafat said.

Smith said that implementing a free cooling system requires additional valving and a heat exchanger. Implementing this feature into an existing facility could potentially be a nightmare, he added. “To design it for a data centre would require significantly more wall area for air intakes, and then you’d have to construct more relief area as well,” Smith said. “Even on a new design, it can be somewhat of a challenge, but on an existing facility, it’s definitely a challenge.”

According to other data centre experts, such as King, the cost of staffing a data centre in remote cold weather environments is typically higher because companies will have to ask employees to relocate.

“Depending on how remote it is, you are probably looking at additional transportation costs for bringing in new equipment,” he added. Companies would also have to plan for new threats such as ice storms, King said.

Overall, while the cooling issue is obviously a critical one, the proximity to cheap and plentiful power is a much bigger issue, said King. “There are stories of Google opening up data centres in very rural areas that are just down the road from very large power-generating facilities.”

San Francisco, CA - March 13, 2009 - Innotas, the only on-demand Project Portfolio Management (PPM) provider for IT Governance, has expanded its operations into Canada, the company announced today. As part of the expansion, Innotas also announced it has partnered with RackForce, one of North America's fastest growing hosted-service providers that operates its own fully equipped, state-of-the-art data centers and servers in southwestern Canada.

By partnering with RackForce (www.rackforce.com), Innotas gains significant market and operations efficiencies, along with fail-safe advantages including full redundancy from a facility, network, and power perspective. Moreover, RackForce is strategically located outside areas of frequent natural disasters, making it ideally situated to host business critical applications and disaster recovery services.

San Francisco, CA - March 13, 2009 - Innotas, the only on-demand Project Portfolio Management (PPM) provider for IT Governance, has expanded its operations into Canada, the company announced today. As part of the expansion, Innotas also announced it has partnered with RackForce, one of North America's fastest growing hosted-service providers that operates its own fully equipped, state-of-the-art data centers and servers in southwestern Canada.

By partnering with RackForce (www.rackforce.com), Innotas gains significant market and operations efficiencies, along with fail-safe advantages including full redundancy from a facility, network, and power perspective. Moreover, RackForce is strategically located outside areas of frequent natural disasters, making it ideally situated to host business critical applications and disaster recovery services.

As the only on-demand PPM (http://www.innotas.com/solutions/ondemand.html) solution specifically designed to meet the needs of IT organizations, Innotas has seen its customer implementations rise significantly in sectors including state and local government, publishing and media, manufacturing and retail. Along with exceptional service and constant product innovation, it is imperative that Innotas provide a reliable and highly-available service for its rapidly expanding base of high-growth customers.

"RackForce met a number of criteria for Innotas, including a turnkey suite of hosting products and services that allow Innotas to get up and running very quickly, as well as dedicated hardware and reliable, scalable infrastructure inside Canada. This will enable us to continue to provide exceptional service and meet the needs of our expanding customer base far into the future," said Tim Madewell, vice president of Operations, Innotas.

The partnership with RackForce also enables Innotas to extend its commitment to providing "green" Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) PPM solutions. All of the RackForce datacenters are powered by hydro-electric energy which has a carbon footprint 1/50th that of data centers powered by coal fired generation. More than 50% of North America's power comes from coal.

Datacenters are one of the largest consumers of electrical energy in North America and thus one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Ensuring that they are as environmentally responsible as possible has become critical due to both the rising cost of energy and the onset of global climate change.

"We are pleased to be providing our dynamic data center infrastructure services to Innotas for its SaaS Business. The SaaS industry is exploding and it is exciting to see companies like Innotas take into account both the green and growth sides of business. Innotas is exactly the type of company that RackForce was built to support. Success is inevitable with a combination like this," explained Brian Fry, vice president of Sales and Marketing, RackForce.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce (www.rackforce.com) is a leading provider of green data center infrastructure and network services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its advanced data center design, automated systems and virtualization expertise it provides highly reliable On-Demand servers, collocation and connectivity to a world-wide customer base.

About Innotas

Innotas provides the only on-demand Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution specifically designed to meet the needs of IT organizations. With Innotas, managers and team members improve collaboration and can more effectively and efficiently manage IT initiatives, projects, and resources. For CIOs and executives, Innotas delivers deep visibility, automation, and analysis of the project portfolio, and improves resource planning and utilization. Our customers, including Athabasca University, Compugen, Crayola, Forbes, Hamilton Beach, Jo-Ann Stores, The NorthWest Companies, WorldVision and many others, span a wide range of industries including financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, telecommunications and energy. For more information please visit www.innotas.com or contact us at +1 415.814.7700.

RackForce has been selected by HostReview's award panel as one of the best web hosting companies of 2008 for the Best VPS Hosting category.

RackForce has been selected by HostReview's award panel as one of the best web hosting companies of 2008 for the Best VPS Hosting category. The Best Web Hosting Awards are based on the overall product offering, value, customer service and users' reviews of the selected companies.

December 2, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Under increasing pressure to manage its growing virtual environment, dynamic dedicated server provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) has installed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to centralize and streamline the management of its virtual machines developed through Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

December 2, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Under increasing pressure to manage its growing virtual environment, dynamic dedicated server provider RackForce (www.rackforce.com) has installed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to centralize and streamline the management of its virtual machines developed through Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

The first hosting service provider to bring Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 technology to market, RackForce is one of many hosting providers that have been looking for effective solutions to better manage their new virtualized IT environments, according to its Monday announcement. With hundreds of customers steadily expanding the company's data centre, RackForce found it difficult to manage the company's growing virtual environment.

RackForce's new, simplified IT management lets it maintain an average of four customers to each physical server, rather than the tradition one-to-one ratio. This lightens the company's operating costs enormously, and it also maximizes existing IT infrastructure as it grows.

Designed to help administrators configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server, Microsoft officially released its first public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 in April. It was generally released in October.

The early adopters in the green data centre market are generally companies that operate and run the facilities as their core source of revenue. In Canada, data centre firm RackForce is working with IBM on a new facility called gigaCentre, based in Kelowna, B.C.

The early adopters in the green data centre market are generally companies that operate and run the facilities as their core source of revenue. In Canada, data centre firm RackForce is working with IBM on a new facility called gigaCentre, based in Kelowna, B.C.

Although RackForce’s customer base is worldwide, “we also started to see a lot more localized demand from people across the country who wanted a safe place to put their equipment,” said RackForce vice-president Brian Fry. This was especially true of B.C. companies, who were worried about using data centres near the San Andreas fault.

IBM had already identified Kelowna as a particularly suitable place for data centre location before it began working with RackForce. Being close to water in a cool climate and away from the wildfire-prone territory often found in the province’s interior made the location a low-risk, low-overhead affair. Also, the facility was a new one, which gave RackForce more energy efficiency options. It is easier to build efficiencies into data centres designed from the ground up than it is to retrofit existing centres with green modifications.

But the company didn’t build the facility entirely from scratch. Instead, it decided to use a 20-year-old manufacturing plant as the shell for its construction. “Building a new building takes a lot of emissions,” said Rick Ellery, territory services leader for B.C. at IBM Canada, who is working on the project with RackForce. “By working with an existing building, we’re able to use recycled or lower grade materials and avoid using the high-end wood products that are becoming threatened in our forests.”

RackForce is kitting out the building as a 150,000-square-foot data centre using the modular approach pioneered by IBM. “The beauty of this model is that we can build on demand,” Fry said. “With most centres like this, on day one you’re cooling this complete, massive space. This is modular, so we only cool what we have to cool. Our expenses and costs are much lower.”

The company included a range of innovations in the data centre’s construction, including reducing the length of high voltage cables to increase efficiency, and placing uninterruptible power supplies directly in the rack instead of in more centralized locations. Those racks of servers were also turned sideways, so that cooling air passed over a shorter distance from side to side rather than from front to back, which made the cooling process more efficient. Variable speed motors were put on all of the air pumps to avoid expending too much energy on pumping when it wasn’t necessary, and the company also relied heavily on cold-aisle containment.

“You put doors and a ceiling in front of two rows of cabinets to enclose them, so that cool air from the underfloor is pulled through the equipment and the warmer air is exhausted out of the back,” Ellery said. “That only cools certain rows of equipment that need the higher capacity.”

Perhaps one of the most significant parts of the data centre’s operation is the source of that cool air. Instead of relying entirely on energy-intensive air conditioning systems, the facility will use external air as much as possible. Cold air is drawn from the outside of the building and removes heat from inside the facility via heat exchangers. Thanks to Canada’s cooler climate, RackForce believes it can use this technique, known as free-air cooling, for seven or eight months of the year.

Canada’s cooler climate isn’t the only thing that makes it an attractive site for data centres. Fry said its abundant water supply and hydroelectric energy make certain parts of the country much more environmentally friendly sources of energy in terms of carbon emissions. “We found that the Yukon, Vermont, Quebec and B.C. sit by far at the lowest,” he said, arguing that whereas energy from coal-fired plants creates more than a thousand grams of carbon per kilowatt hour, hydropower produces about 10 grams.

The first phase of the data centre won’t be completed until December, but IBM has already crunched the numbers to come up with an efficiency rating. It uses the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating from the Green Grid consortium, which measures the ratio between the energy needed for the data centre and the energy used to run the equipment within it. The data centre will have a PUE rating of 1.38, meaning that the facility will need 1.38 watts of electricity for every watt used to power the IT equipment. The ideal is a PUE rating of 1.0, although this is impossible to attain in real-world conditions.

When both IBM and major data centre players such as RackForce start pinpointing areas in Canada as low-risk, low-cost areas for data centre production, it represents an opportunity for the country to reinvent itself as a green computing location.

RackForce Networks Inc. is the recipient of the 2008 Business Excellence Recipients for category company with 21 - 40 employees.

The winners have been announced.

The recipients of the 2008 Business Excellence Awards were announced October 22 at the Delta Grand Okanagan Lakefront Resort in Kelowna.

The winners are:

Roger Sellick, former General Manager of Kelowna International Airport, was honoured as the 2008 Business Leader of the Year, the prestigious award sponsored by UBC Okanagan.

Wildwood Media Ltd. (David and Marghanita Hughes) was the recipient of the 2008 Rising Star award sponsored by the FortisBC. This award is for new companies that have been in business less than three years.

A panel of judges selected four outstanding Kelowna area businesses as the 2008 recipients of the Category Awards:

CATEGORY 1 (1 – 5 employees) sponsored by TD Canada Trust Small Business Banking:

Winner: Kelowna Farmers & Crafters Market (Bob Callioux and Errol Redman)

CATEGORY 2 (6 – 20 employees) sponsored by BDO Dunwoody LLP:

Winner: Kitchenhaus Cabinets Ltd. (Jason Corory and Brooke Nicholas)

CATEGORY 3 (21 – 40 employees) sponsored by BMO Bank of Montreal:

Winner: Rackforce Networks Inc. (Tim Dufour)

CATEGORY 4 (41+ employees) sponsored by MacKay LLP:
Winner: Formashape (div. of Whitewater Composites Ltd.)

YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR (individual under 34 years of age) sponsored by Prospera Credit Union:

Winner: Renee Wasylyk, Troika Developments.

“We salute those who have recognized a business opportunity, seized it and prospered,” says Weldon LeBlanc, CEO, Kelowna Chamber of Commerce. “The accomplishments and dedication of all the finalists honoured last evening are impressive and their stories inspire us all. We are proud of the contributions these exceptional business leaders have made in our community.”

KELOWNA, BC - The recipients of the seven 2008 Business Excellence Awards were announced last evening (October 22) at the Delta Grand Okanagan Lakefront Resort as the 16 finalists, their guests and community leaders celebrated 21 years of business excellence in Kelowna.

KELOWNA, BC - The recipients of the seven 2008 Business Excellence Awards were announced last evening (October 22) at the Delta Grand Okanagan Lakefront Resort as the 16 finalists, their guests and community leaders celebrated 21 years of business excellence in Kelowna.

Roger Sellick, former General Manager of Kelowna International Airport, was honoured as the 2008 Business Leader of the Year, the prestigious award sponsored by UBC Okanagan.

Wildwood Media Ltd. (David and Marghanita Hughes) was the recipient of the 2008 Rising Star award sponsored by the FortisBC. This award is for new companies that have been in business less than three years. Finalists: Beyond 50 Magazine, My Mobi Media Inc., SNAP Okanagan Newspaper Group

A panel of judges selected four outstanding Kelowna area businesses as the 2008 recipients of the Category Awards:

• CATEGORY 1 (1 - 5 employees) sponsored by TD Canada Trust Small Business Banking
  Recipient: Kelowna Farmers & Crafters Market (Bob Callioux and Errol Redman)
  Finalists: Twin Creek Media Inc.
• CATEGORY 2 (6 - 20 employees) sponsored by BDO Dunwoody LLP
  Recipient: Kitchenhaus Cabinets Ltd. (Jason Corory and Brooke Nicholas)
  Finalists: Avalon Event Rentals Inc., Chevy's Source for Sports
• CATEGORY 3 (21 - 40 employees) sponsored by BMO Bank of Montreal*
  Recipient: Rackforce Networks Inc. (Tim Dufour)
  Finalists: Kimco Controls Ltd.
• CATEGORY 4 (41+ employees) sponsored by MacKay LLP
  Recipient: Formashape (div. of Whitewater Composites Ltd.)
  Finalists: The Daily Courier, Westwood Fine Cabinetry
• YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR (individual under 34 years of age) sponsored by Prospera Credit Union
  Recipient: Renee Wasylyk, Troika Developments
  Finalists: Andrew Gaucher, Green Solutions Inc.

"We salute those who have recognized a business opportunity, seized it and prospered," says Weldon LeBlanc, CEO, Kelowna Chamber of Commerce. "The accomplishments and dedication of all the finalists honoured last evening are impressive and their stories inspire us all. We are proud of the contributions these exceptional business leaders have made in our community."

Presented by the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce and Gold Sponsors the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) and Farris, Vaughn, Wills and Murphy LLP, the popular Kelowna event is part of the annual Small Business Week® activities (October 19-25, 2008).

For the past 29 years, Small Business Week® has paid tribute to Canadian entrepreneurs and created opportunities for them to share success stories and innovative ideas with the active participation of members of the Chambers of Commerce and BDC branches across the country.

* bold and color added

British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, long known for its award-winning vineyards, picturesque golf courses and sparkling lakes, is bolstering its reputation with a decidedly unromantic venture - electronic data storage.

British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, long known for its award-winning vineyards, picturesque golf courses and sparkling lakes, is bolstering its reputation with a decidedly unromantic venture - electronic data storage.

Thanks to its stable environment, abundant network bandwidth and proximity to a talented work force and cheap power, high-tech experts predict the Okanagan will become a major information storage shed for companies.

The area's sixth data centre is set to open in Kelowna in December and local entrepreneurs and high-tech experts are confident others will follow.

The key feature that makes the Kelowna area ideal for data storage is the robust fibre-optic pipeline in place, says Dr. Ian Stuart, dean of the Faculty of Management at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus in Kelowna.

Brian Fry

"The second most important factor is people ... the Okanagan has a high level of sophisticated knowledge workers, graduates of computer science degree program or engineering" from UBC's Kelowna campus, he adds.

Equally important is the area's stable environment, according to others familiar with the region. Geologic surveys indicate that the Okanagan is about 240 kilometres from the nearest earthquake zone; and it is safe from other natural disasters, such as floods, tornadoes and major storms, which could knock out the computers that are the backbone of the data storage sector.

Robert Fine, director of economic development for the Regional District of the Central Okanagan Valley, says the burgeoning data storage sector is a bonus for Kelowna, which underwent a "crisis moment" in 2001 when Western Star Trucks Holdings Ltd. closed its manufacturing plant there.

"The companies we are attracting, including IBM, are a sign to the world that this is a safe place to do business," he says. "We are not earthquake prone, we have an international airport with a runway that is being expanded to 8,900 feet, we have a safe climate and we are not a big city that is vulnerable to terrorist attacks."

The most recent addition to the area's information storehouses is the conversion of the former truck plant into a data centre by Gigacenter Services Corp. of Kelowna. The $75-million, 225,000-square-foot structure is being engineered by IBM Canada Ltd. in partnership with Kelowna-based RackForce Networks Inc., which specializes in server hosting and currently runs three data centres.

IBM will lease 70,000 square feet of space in the facility, which is being marketed as GigaCenter, to provide data processing and storage services to as many as 500 of its customers, beginning in December.

IBM considers the Okanagan one of the most preferable locations in Canada for data storage, largely because the area's climate and seismic conditions ensure that it can serve its clientele without interruption, says Rick Ellery, IBM's Vancouver-based territory services leader for B.C.

"When you look at Canada's geographies and those with minimal amounts of risk ... the Okanagan stands out as an area free from those kinds of issues," he says.

IBM is also high on the GigaCenter because its use of renewable hydroelectric power from the nearby Columbia River, Mr. Ellery says. As well, a handful of features built into the complex mean the building will be more energy efficient and "greener" than most data centres, a key consideration as the environment becomes a bigger issue.

"A green data centre focus has emerged in the last year or two, so it is important for our customers to be good corporate citizens by minimizing their IT carbon footprint. The basis of green IT is the use of non-dirty power that is hydro generated," as is the case at the GigaCenter, he says.

Brian Fry, vice-president of sales and marketing for RackForce Networks and Gigacenter Services, says cooling hundreds of computers and the facility's workspaces will be five times more efficient by using a high-capacity water system rather than traditional electrically powered air conditioners; in addition, backup generators will be fuelled 85 per cent by natural gas rather than diesel fuel, meaning less air pollution.

These and other energy-saving features, when combined with the use of hydroelectric power, mean GigaCenter will use nearly 66 per cent less energy, reducing costs for its customers and at the same considerably reducing the building's environmental footprint, says Tim Dufour, chief executive officer of RackForce and Gigacenter Services.

Another Kelowna data storage company that's meeting the demand for less expensive and green data stores is Iron Diamond Systems, which provides outsourced data centre infrastructure services, such as network disaster recovery, data backup and data replication.

Like IBM, the company was drawn to the Okanagan because of its seismic stability and cheap power, which means it can offer the safe and green data storage demanded by companies that are sensitive to the environment and cognizant of the need to safely store data, says president and CEO David Tarasenko.

Mr. Fine says data centres are not the only companies he is attempting to lure to the Okanagan.

Green electricity at rates that are among the cheapest in Canada, access to an updated highway system, direct flights to Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto and plenty of engineering and technology graduates from the three-year-old UBC Kelowna campus make the area attractive to a wide variety of industries, he says.

These and other attributes - including proximity to prime vacation country and the fact that Kelowna is seen as a great city to raise a family - are already propelling the area's growth.

"Data centres are obvious for the region but at this point we are working our way through the planning process to decide our priority ... should data centres be a priority? How does it match to our labour pool? We are now doing an analysis to decide on the Okanagan's future economic direction."

Kelowna, BC, Canada - RackForce Networks (www.rackforce.com) announced today the launch of "DDS-V", the latest in its virtual server line of Dynamic Dedicated Servers. The DDS-V is a robust "cloud computing" environment that combines Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology, IBM SAN based storage and powerful IBM x3950 servers.

Kelowna, BC, Canada - RackForce Networks (www.rackforce.com) announced today the launch of "DDS-V", the latest in its virtual server line of Dynamic Dedicated Servers. The DDS-V is a robust "cloud computing" environment that combines Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technology, IBM SAN based storage and powerful IBM x3950 servers.

RackForce's General Manager Randall Robinson explained, "RackForce has long been touted as the 'virtualization experts'. Since RackForce's launch of its Dynamic Dedicated Services strategy in 2003 we have been providing advanced hosting solutions through virtual server technology to a global market. With the DDS-V initiative we asked our solutions/product team to build an enterprise class solution with complete ON Demand scalability. We believe we are the first to market with such a powerful and scalable solution that is based on technology from major vendors."

DDS-V separates storage, CPU and memory resources from the physical server. Unlike traditional virtual server solutions DDS-V resources can be scaled instantly since the data is stored on a SAN and not on traditional hard drives contained within the physical server hardware.

James Bothe, one of RackForce's server virtualization experts and Chief Solutions Architect commented, "We have been working with Hyper-V in its various incarnations since the first alpha version came out. Microsoft did a great job getting out a solid virtualization technology. When we combined it with the IBM SAN and x3950 servers it all came together. I believe we have hit it out of the park with the DDS-V solution."

The DDS-V was designed for SaaS and hosting requirements and is available now by going to RackForce's web site at http://www.rackforce.com/. Discounts are available for qualified resellers.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is a leading provider of green data center infrastructure and network services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its advanced data center design, automated systems and virtualization expertise it provides highly reliable On Demand servers, collocation and connectivity to a world-wide customer base.

In December 2008 it will be opening the technologically advanced 150,000 Sq Ft GigaCenter. This very green data center is being engineered to support the rigorous computing demands of today and tomorrow. GigaCenter provides colocation space with power and cooling capabilities to support a variety of technologies including high density blade centers, virtualized server clusters and mainframes.

RackForce Networks rolls out Microsoft Hyper-V as way to speed on-the-spot scalability.

Hosting provider RackForce Networks expects that Microsoft's just released Hyper-V virtualization technology will give it a chance to take a major step in its business strategy.

The company, which hosts dedicated and virtual private servers for e-businesses, application providers and hosting resellers, has been working toward providing resource upgrades on the fly. Today, the company accomplishes that to a varying degree, but Hyper-V takes it to another level.

RackForce provides services up to the operating-system level, while customers load and manage their applications. Its Dynamic Dedicated Servers (DDS) give users a virtual space on a physical host, but now it wants to provide DDS-V, or virtualized DDS, where the data storage is pushed off to a storage-area network (SAN), allowing instantaneous scaling of applications.

Given Hyper-V's support for SANs, RackForce can scale its platform to add more processing power without having to worry about moving or copying data.

"The model we are rolling out relies on SANs," says Tim Dufour, CEO of RackForce. "[SAN support] does an incredible thing. It allows us to move capacity in seconds, so scalability is instantaneous."

In addition, Microsoft's new Virtual Machine Manager tool eventually will let RackForce find and allocate resources located anywhere in its forthcoming GigCenter data center, not just within a single DDS platform. RackForce currently has three British Columbia-based data centers that tap into hydropower.

Diagram of use of Hyper-V by RackForce

Today RackForce has 2,500 server customers, 60% of which run on virtualized environments within DDS platforms. The other 40% are on traditional dedicated servers. Of the 60% using virtualization, just less than half are running Windows.

Dufour says the other major enhancements important in Hyper-V are the removal of limitations on processor support and elimination of the 4GB restriction imposed on RAM by Hyper-V's predecessor Virtual Server. Removing those limitations means customers won't "bump their heads" as they try to expand, he says. RackForce runs Hyper-V on IBM x3950 servers with four quad-core processors, and stacks four machines to create a platform with 16 processors and 64 cores.

While Hyper-V will help push RackForce forward, Microsoft's virtualization platform still is missing some needed elements, such as a complete set of provisioning tools, Dufour says. RackForce will offer its instantaneous scalability via a portal so users can service their own needs, but the company will have to tie that into its billing, ticketing and inventory systems. Currently RackForce has to do that integration itself.

The big ticket, however, is live migration, a feature Microsoft cut from the first version of Hyper-V. "That is important, and we are looking forward to it," Dufour says. "If we wanted to move from the x3950 platform and scale up beyond the current processor power, we could do that migration without any downtime." 

Dufour knows the luxury of such a move because RackForce can do live migrations with its Linux-based virtualization platforms. "But our Hyper-V technicians are telling us it has come a long way and they are impressed. And these guys are typically Linux techies."

A partnership between IBM Canada and RackForce will see an energy-efficient facility built for the customers of gigaCenter Services Corp. Why location matters as much as the technology.

A partnership between IBM Canada and RackForce will see an energy-efficient facility built for the customers of gigaCenter Services Corp. Why location matters as much as the technology.

A collocation startup is using Kelowna, B.C. as the location for a $75 million data centre that promises to make extensive use of so-called "green IT" and other energy-efficient techniques.

The data centre will be built by IBM Canada and Rackforce, which is also based in B.C. Due to be set up before the end of this year, the facility will be operated by gigaCenter Services Corp., which is partly owned by RackForce and a private equity company. It will comprise 70,000 sq. ft. of raised-floor data center space and create jobs for up to 100 employees, the company said. Like Q9 Networks, Peer One and Fusepoint Managed Services, enterprise firms will be able to rent out space in the gigaCenter facility to house their server equipment and provide business continuity, on-demand computing and other services.

Rick Ellery, IBM territory services leader for general business in B.C., said the company is using its Rear Door Heat xChanger and other products to cut down on power costs, while recognizing that the gigaCenter's customers needs could range from 80 watts per square foot to 200 watts. The green IT emphasis goes all the way from sizing the generators with UPS, the switch gear and even simple details such as the length of the electrical cables between the UPS systems and the computer cabinets.

"That may sound like a fairly mundane detail, but it's amazing the amount of power loss you can experience over those high-voltage cables," he said, adding such fine-tuning isn't always possible with older data centres encumbered with legacy configurations. "We had the luxury with the gigaCenter to start with a clean slate."

RackForce vice-president of sales and marketing Brian Fry said the data centre will be more than 60 per cent virtualized, which will mean gigaCenter can help customers take equipment running at 20 per cent capacity and bring it up to nearly 80 per cent.

“As we work through this process, we’ll keep coming up with ways to accommodate those requirements. We know that not every customer is going to use virtualization, but there’s a great deal of savings for the customer,” he said. “Even if you look down to the network design, you can turn bandwidth up on demand.”

Fry said RackForce and others involved in gigaCener got together more than a year and a half ago to determine where the data centre would be located. Kelowna met all the requirements perfectly, though it took some long-range thinking.

“There are lots of things people don’t take into consideration. Besides green power, you have to look at the seismic rift, wind threats. What’s the climate like – does it go to extreme colds? Do you have railways nearby that would take out the whole facility? Does it just cut off power?”

In Kelowna’s case, the grid is independent, which means it can’t be taken down by other grids the way some Ontario facilities were affected by the blackout of 2003. And unlike Alberta, Ellery added, where coal generated fossil fuel-based power is the norm, the gigaCenter will be fuelled by hydro. “By it’s nature it’s green power,” he said.

One of the biggest factors in Ellery’s mind was the ability to get out of the earthquake zone. “We live on a fault line. It’s almost inevitable that there will one day be a major earthquake,” he said. “It could be catastrophic, it could affect businesses in a major way. Kelowna has a 24/7 airport – there are direct flights from other locations. It has a four-lane highway. All these things are important.”

Even the backup power will be more energy-efficient, Fry said. Normally in an emergency data centres rely on diesel-powered generators, but the gigaCenter’s machine will quickly switch to 85 per cent natural gas.

“We’re putting a lot less of the ugly stuff into the air,” he said.

Once the Kelowna data centre is complete, gigaCenter will possibly be developing additional sites in the Okanogan Valley.

New details have been made public about a GigaCenter to be built in Kelowna. It will be even bigger and better than initially thought.

New details have been made public about a GigaCenter to be built in Kelowna. It will be even bigger and better than initially thought.

"This is so significant," said Brian Fry of Kelowna-based RackForce, which is in partnership with IBM on the project.

"Previously, we thought the data centre would be 85,000 square feet (as announced in February). Now, it will be 150,000 square feet, cost $75 million and be able to house 80,000 high-speed, very advanced servers and will become the biggest in the country."

Currently, the biggest data centre in Canada is Q9 in Toronto.

To put this in perspective, 150,000 square feet is larger than even Kelowna's largest store -- the 140,000 square foot Rona Home & Garden.

Every one of the 80,000, two-feet-by-three- feet servers is positioned on its own rack (thus RackForce's name).

Every server can accommodate about 1,000 websites or applications, which means the Kelowna GigaCenter will route, store and backup the activity of up to 80 million websites and applications.

Why is Kelowna getting such an important international facility?

"Kelowna is unique in the world when it comes to places to have a data centre," said Fry.

"Kelowna has a good, green, reliable power source (hydro-based electricity), has no threat of earthquake or flood and is in the stable and free country of Canada."

These factors are important to companies and Internet providers that want to make sure their websites, data storage and computer applicants are secure and have no service interruption.

Servers create a lot of noise and heat and require a lot of power and engineering expertise to run. They need to be housed in a specialized environment.

In the GigaCenter's case, that means a reinforced building with a raised floor so miles of cables and cooling pipes can be run underneath.

It will have its own substation to deliver electricity and have 12 room-sized generators as backup power.

The location for the GigaCenter hasn't been disclosed, but Fry says it will be in an existing building that will be disclosed in a few weeks.

An existing building that has to be at least 150,000 square feet leads to speculation that it must be either the former Western Star Trucks factory on Enterprise Way, or the former Hiram Walker distillery in Winfield.

The GigaCenter is expected to partially open in December with full capacity in about three years.

RackForce has about 2,600 servers in data centres housed in the basements of the Landmark office buildings in Kelowna and has purchased a lot of the servers from IBM.

Because of that, RackForce caught IBM's attention and led the multi-national to partner with the local company to engineer and market the GigaCenter.

While IBM is a partner, the GigaCenter is owned by RackForce founders Fry and Tim Dufour.

A varied, worldwide lists of clients is expected to take server space at the centre, ranging from huge companies that need vast data storage, e-commerce and network capabilities to Internet providers that sell and manage websites to individual clients.

Kip Frasz / The Okanagan Saturday

RackForce now has 25 employees in Kelowna and will have 100 by the time the centre is running at full capacity.

They will work on infrastructure maintenance, engineering and network and technical support.

A $75 million GigaCenter is being set up in Kelowna by local company RackForce and international conglomerate IBM. Randall Robinson of RackForce is seen in the company's existing server centre in the basement of one of the Landmark buildings in Kelowna.

KELOWNA, BC and MONTREAL - 11 Jun 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) has signed an agreement to help build a $ CDN 75 million, 150,000 square foot "green" data center in the heart of British Columbia with gigaCENTER Services Corporation, in partnership with RackForce Networks.

KELOWNA, BC and MONTREAL - 11 Jun 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) has signed an agreement to help build a $ CDN 75 million, 150,000 square foot "green" data center in the heart of British Columbia with gigaCENTER Services Corporation, in partnership with RackForce Networks.

The new facility called gigaCENTER Services Corp will be among the most efficient and "greenest" large-scale data centers in Canada. It is being developed using IBM's modular approach and will include power and cooling capabilities to support a variety of technologies from high-density blade servers to mainframes.

"We are building a data center with IBM in a safe and secure location to respond to growing issues about natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods," said Tim Dufour, CEO of both RackForce and gigaCENTER. "This center will support the latest technologies using 'green' hydro-generated power and the most efficient, environmentally friendly design. The IBM design is calculated at a Power Usage Effectiveness rating of 1.38, which will mean our facility will be among the most efficient in the industry."

IBM products and services will be delivered over the three-year construction, with the first phase scheduled to open in December 2008. When completed, the facility will support 70,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space and create jobs for up to 100 employees.

Customers of the new center will be able to rent space in increments as small as one cabinet, up to dedicated cages and private rooms. The center will provide facilities to support on demand server capacity services and Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, delivered through RackForce and IBM Global Services.

"A year ago when IBM launched Project Big Green, one of its goals was to help identify ways to optimize data center usage and reduce energy consumption needs," said Steve Sams, IBM vice president, Global Site and Facilities Services. "This new data center is an example of this initiative. By offering 'green' colocation and data center services, gigaCENTER and IBM will enable enterprises to meet their corporate and IT environmental goals."

About RackForce

RackForce is a leading provider of green data center infrastructure and network services from its strategically located facilities in the heart of British Columbia, Canada. Through its superior data center design, automated systems and virtualization expertise it provides highly reliable On Demand servers, colocation and connectivity to a worldwide customer base.

About gigaCENTER

gigaCenter Services Corporation is a leader in the design, construction and operation of premium green data centers engineered to support the rigorous computing demands of today and the future. gigaCENTER will provide power and cooling capabilities to support a variety of technologies including high density blade servers, virtualized server clusters and mainframes.

About IBM

For more information about IBM, go to www.ibm.com.

Pristine lakes and sunny skies may be what brings the tourists to Kelowna, but it’s the ability to withstand natural disasters that just brought a major
IBM presence here.

Pristine lakes and sunny skies may be what brings the tourists to Kelowna, but it’s the ability to withstand natural disasters that just brought a major IBM presence here.

Jay Robinson, account executive for Rackforce

By the end of this year, a partnership between local company Rackforce and IBM will come to fruition, with the completion of a 85,000 square-foot data centre that has the capacity to store 35,000 terabytes of data, explained Brian Fry, Rackforce’s vice-president and co-founder.

“This is a big project,” said Fry. “With such a large facility, there will be large companies that will want to be located in Kelowna to be closer to their data centre.”

Put simply, the Rackforce-named “Gigacentre” will  have an enormous storage capability for critical data that comes from government agencies and corporations all across North America.

Currently, many of these organizations house their data within their corporate headquarters, usually located in urban hubs like Vancouver and Victoria.

With the impending threats of various of natural disasters looming over those cities, finding a spot where data can be safely protected has become paramount, and that’s where Kelowna fits in.

This region of the valley is very geographically stable, said Rick Ellery IBM’s territory services leader “The number one factor is that it’s out of the earthquake zone,” Ellery said.

“If there is a seismic event the operations of (major corporate) data centres would be jeopardized.”

Further conditions that this region is protected from are windstorms and ice storms, Ellery noted, all of which can knock out power systems and subsequently cause havoc for computer data server sources.

Ellery also said that the Okanagan is ideal because it’s a central locale between Vancouver and Calgary, and nicely positioned to serve customers within Western Canada.

Yet another key factor is that Kelowna is hydroreliant and IBM is keen on the cleaner and cheaper form of energy.

“Kelowna has an abundance of hydro-driven power, and although reliable power is important, it’s equally important that it’s considered green power,” Ellery said.

Other things that drew the company to the region were that Kelowna has an international airport with direct flights to international centres, a four-lane highway to Vancouver, an abundance of amenities and a sizeable high-tech workforce.

According to Robert Fine, the executive director of the Economic Development Commission, the news that IBM has turned its focus in this direction, and the influence that it, in turn will have on major IT companies, is another step in the right direction.

“Every community wants to have high tech industry,” Fine said.

“It’s clean and it’s a high yield, high pay industry.” 

And, he explained that it was reassuring that there is continued growth—about five to 10 per cent a year— in the high-tech segment of our local economy.

“We had significant technology growth, then the tech industry imploded, but we mostly held our own in terms of maintaining some growth,” he said.

“As we continue one of our strategic targets is working OSTEC around high tech, and I think this is another great opportunity for us to broaden the region’s image as a tech-friendly area because we are attracting high tech companies.”

It's Kelowna, British Columbia, says IBM, which is working with Rackforce to open a huge data center in this small city far from earthquake and flood zones, close to cheap power sources and just a short flight from Vancouver.

Wed, February 13, 2008 — CIO — As far as vacation destinations go, popular hotspots such as Honolulu and California's Wine Country have nothing on British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

A view Kelowna, British Columbia. Photo by J. F. Bergeron via Tourism Kelowna

The area offers award-winning vineyards, tasty organic produce, a 68-mile freshwater lake and nearly 50 golf courses, all within an hour's drive. The city of Kelowna, the de facto capital of the region that boasts gourmet restaurants, world-class real estate, an international airportand a cultural district complete with museums, theater groups and a ballet.

But what most tourist brochures don't mention is that the Okanagan also is becoming known in IT spheres for something else: data processing and storage.

Thanks to its seismic stability, cheap and accessible power and a talented workforce, the Okanagan recently has seen a proliferation of data services vendors and has attracted interest from at least one major international corporation to build one of the biggest data centers in the world.

When it opens later this year, this $100 million data center—appropriately dubbed the Gigacentre—will total 85,000 square feet and will have the capacity to store nearly 35,000 terabytes of data. Put differently, the Gigacentre will generate more than 700 watts per square foot, while most data centers currently generate a maximum of 300 watts per square foot.

The Gigacentre is a joint venture between IBM and Rackforce, a local hosting service provider. It will be IBM's first data center in British Columbia and is powered by hydroelectric energy from the Columbia River. Interestingly, it's not the first North American data center to be powered by the Columbia, as the map below shows. Other data centers from Google in The Dalles, Ore., and Microsoft in Quincy, Wash., and Spokane, Wash., get their energy from the same waterway.

Safe, Yet Close to the U.S.

Brian Fry, vice president and cofounder of Rackforce, says the center, expected to open by this summer, will cement the Okanagan's position as the new data capital of the West—a position that could be particularly intriguing for U.S. companies who are looking to keep mission-critical information offsite.

"There's a lot of data out there," he says. "The Okanagan provides a safe yet close place to store it for U.S. companies to keep it under watchful eye."

Rackforce isn't the only local data storage company to meet this demand; currently, there's also a company named Iron Diamond Networks, which provides outsourced data center infrastructure services such as disaster recovery, data backup and data replication.

Similar businesses are on the way—statistics from the local economic development office indicate that nearly 20 percent of the 12,800 new business licenses doled out in 2007 were to high-tech firms.

This growth is contagious. Robert Fine, director of economic development for the regional district of the central Okanagan Valley, which covers the cities of Kelowna, Westbank and Peachland, says that according to a Canadian growth index that measures factors including unemployment rate, business starts and building permits, the Okanagan economy has grown by a staggering 11.1 percent since 2005, in step with growth in other Western Canadian cities such as Vancouver and Calgary.

"We think the local economy is going to slow down, but everything around here keeps growing," he says. At a time when real estate is slumping in the U.S., Okanagan real estate is skyrocketing—the current median price is $539,000, up from $469,000 in 2006 and $374,000 in 2005.

Capitalizing on Environmental Stability

All this growth is fine and good, but what makes the Okanagan such a great spot for data services? Environmental stability, for one.

Geologic surveys indicate that the Okanagan is at least 150 miles from the nearest earthquake zone. Climate experts also have said that the region's location in the high desert makes it safe from other disasters such as floods, tornadoes and major storms.

Perhaps the only natural risk: wildfires, which ravaged the local countryside in the summer of 2003 but left most of the urban areas relatively unscathed.

"We considered the threat [of fire], but when we assessed it against threats in other geographies and other regions, it was far down on the scale," says Rick Ellery, territory services leader for the British Columbia division of IBM Canada. "Even with the fires, the Okanagan is one of the safest spots in North America to build a data center."

Cheap and Plentiful Power

The area offers another key ingredient to large-scale data storage: cheap and plentiful power.

Just about all of the energy in the region is hydroelectric, with two companies—FortisBC and BCHydro—pulling power from a series of dams along the Columbia River (yes, the same Columbia that empties near Astoria, Ore., starts in the Kootenay Rockies region and eventually runs near the Okanagan, too).

While this energy is cheaper than traditional alternatives such as coal or oil—hydro power can be as low as 2 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to as much as 20 cents per kilowatt hour for other means —it's also "greener," meaning the process does not rely on renewable resources at all.

Furthermore, David Tarasenko, president and chief executive of IronDiamond, says that by virtualizing certain accounts, data storage providers can cut back on energy use by as much as 50 percent.

"As the environment becomes a bigger issue, green IT is going to become a huge consideration for companies looking to store data offsite," he predicts. "Here in the Okanagan, we can provide that."

IT Labor Supply

A third and final reason data storage companies have flourished in the Okanagan is that the area is home to a young and talented workforce of IT professionals to keep things going.

Local high-tech companies such as Club Penguin, which was recently sold to Disney for roughly $365 million, are always bringing in workers from big cities like Vancouver and Calgary. The relatively new University of British Columbia at Okanagan also has a computer science program (14 graduates in 2007).

All told, the triumvirate of stability, power and smart people create a perfect atmosphere for data storage in the beautiful Okanagan Valley. The local economic development director jokes that if this high-tech boom continues, the region might just have to build a marketing campaign around its new data center and IT.

"We used to call the area 'Silicon Vineyard' because we felt the nickname perfectly captured the Okanagan's mixture of natural beauty and high-tech," he says. "We haven't used it in a while, but who knows? It's never too late to bring it back."

Kelowna, BC, Canada - RackForce announced today that it now offers enterprise grade backup service for its hosted server customers by utilizing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager in line with Storage Area Networks and LTO4 tape systems.

RackForce's General Manager Randall Robinson explained, "Hosting infrastructure providers are in the business of providing reliability but our industry has not typically provided backup solutions capable of supporting the fast growing online web sites and applications. We knew we could not stay status quo on this and decided after much research and planning that the award winning Tivoli backup solution was the answer."

Kelowna, BC, Canada - RackForce announced today that it now offers enterprise grade backup service for its hosted server customers by utilizing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager in line with Storage Area Networks and LTO4 tape systems.

RackForce's General Manager Randall Robinson explained, "Hosting infrastructure providers are in the business of providing reliability but our industry has not typically provided backup solutions capable of supporting the fast growing online web sites and applications. We knew we could not stay status quo on this and decided after much research and planning that the award winning Tivoli backup solution was the answer."

Many enterprise products like IBM Tivoli have traditionally not been available to the small to medium size business. Now that larger hosting infrastructure providers have the economies of scale to attract vendors like IBM they can provide the technology as a service and make it affordable for everyone. Now solutions providers, ISVs and hosting companies can provide first class backup for their customers.

"Tivoli is a system administrator's dream. With the RackForce implementation our reseller customers will be able to store up to 14 versions per month of backup to RackForce's SAN and LTO4 tape systems. They will have access to a Graphical User Interface and will be able to customize which data is backed up. Even live databases can be backed up and long-term data archived. This is exactly what today's online business needs to keep constantly changing data safe and secure," stated James Bothe, System Administrator for RackForce.

RackForce will begin providing its Tivoli backup service on its 5000, 5100, 5300 and 5350 Server models with Windows or Linux Operating Systems and DDS Windows Virtual Private Servers. It will be affordably priced on a monthly flat rate plus overages. For more information please go to http://rackforce.com/rackforce.com/hosting_services/tsm_features.html.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is one of the fastest growing Hosting Service Providers in North America. From its three data centers the company provides 24/7 dedicated servers, virtual private servers and collocation services to a growing world-wide customer base. Due to its unique location in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada it has access to redundant hydro power feeds, a well educated employee pool and excellent world-class carrier networks.

VMware Inc. may have the market share and, with its recent successful IPO, all the momentum.

But the server virtualization leader lacks one thing that second banana Microsoft Corp. has as of Thursday: a system management platform that gives IT administrators a single simultaneous view of their physical and virtual servers.

VMware Inc. may have the market share and, with its recent successful IPO, all the momentum.

But the server virtualization leader lacks one thing that second banana Microsoft Corp. has as of Thursday: a system management platform that gives IT administrators a single simultaneous view of their physical and virtual servers.

That's key, say analysts, as users realize that implementing virtualization tactically to save money can -- without proper management tools to aid them -- create a confusing infrastructure mess.

"It's just like when client-server computing got hot two decades ago," said IDC analyst Stephen Elliot. "There's no need to repeat that mistake again."

As the name of Microsoft's new release implies, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 works closely with Microsoft's other management and provisioning products, such as System Center Configuration Manager (formerly Systems Management Server, or SMS) and System Center Operations Manager (formerly Microsoft Operations Manager, or MOM).

For instance, through its integration with MOM, VMM users such as RackForce Networks Inc. sysadmin James Bothe can get a quick snapshot rating of each physical server based on a combination of factors. Those include parameters such as CPU utilization, RAM usage, and hard drive space.

That information gives Bothe quick insight into how many more virtual machines he can deploy onto a given physical host, and what kind. "It's a unique and nice feature," Bothe said.

RackForce has been testing VMM since the first round of beta. The Kelowna, British Columbia-based hosting provider plans to use VMM to manage its 600-plus Windows servers -- it has another 1,800 Linux servers -- that each host 4-6 virtual machines created by Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

VMM "is really easy to use.... I don't have to log into 10-15 servers a day anymore. I can just log into one and run everything from there," said Bothe, who has worked with many Linux management tools in the past, though not VMware's VirtualCenter (that company's counterpart to VMM).

VirtualCenter 2.0, VMware's latest edition, does not help administrators manage physical servers. Instead, VMWare has released a software development kit that allows other systems management software providers such as HP's OpenView or IBM's Tivoli or Director to pull data from VirtualCenter in order to manage both physical and virtual servers from their console.

But Elliott says that VMM sales will benefit from Microsoft's large base of SMS and MOM users, in addition to the technical benefits it enjoys from being part of the same family of products.

VirtualCenter manages only virtual instances created by VMware software. That's likewise true for Microsoft-created virtual machines and VMM, formerly codenamed 'Carmine,' today.

However, Microsoft says it already has in the works a version of VMM that will be able to manage virtual guests created by VMware or Xen (best known for creating Linux VMs) in addition to Microsoft-created virtual machines.

Beta one of that product is promised for release in the first quarter next year.

Took a licking and...

Microsoft has taken many licks this year in virtualization, having been forced to delay features and product releases multiple times.

But with VMM, Redmond came out swinging. Not only did it announce the application's release just days before VMware's VMWorld show in San Francisco next week, but Microsoft also heavily undercut VMware on price.

A Workgroup edition of VMM available in January will cost $499 per physical server, with an unlimited number of VMs on top. Because it is aimed at small to mid-sized businesses, companies are allowed to buy only five copies.

By contrast, single licenses of VirtualCenter cost about $5,000 each.

Microsoft is also offering a bundle that includes 2007 versions of VMM, Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, and another new product, Data Protection Manager, for $860 per server plus a subscription to Software Assurance that adds an additional $215 -- 25% per year. Small companies can buy SA contracts as short as two years. Enterprises can choose the length, typically between 2-4 years.

By contrast, VMware's equivalent bundle, the Infrastructure Enterprise Edition version 3, costs about $6,500.

Other applications necessary for server virtualization from both vendors, such as Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 or VMware Server, are free.

At its VMworld show next week, VMware may announce plans to upgrade VirtualCenter to make it a heterogeneous management platform. Or it may choose to execute on a previously planned price cut.

VMware may have a commanding lead of the market today, but analysts such as Chris Voce at Forrester Research Inc. point out that the market is also very young. Many large corporations still remain on the sidelines, waiting to see how this battle between Microsoft and VMware plays out over the next several years before committing themselves to either vendor, he said.

Servers are the power-thirsty heart of every corporate IT system. So software and new processors that make them more efficient are good news for business—and the planet

May 10, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- IBM (ibm.com) announced on Wednesday it is spending $1 billion in an effort to make corporate data centers more energy efficient.

May 10, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- IBM (ibm.com) announced on Wednesday it is spending $1 billion in an effort to make corporate data centers more energy efficient.

According to reports, not unlike many other large companies in the technology industry, IBM has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and will upgrade its data centers as well as help its customers redo their own facilities with multiple power-saving approaches.

IBM says it expects to make data centers more energy efficient through heavier use of virtualization technologies as well as deploying more provisioning software. It is also planning on launching new liquid-cooling systems that capture power in off-peak times and store it for peak use.

Reports say the $1 billion is being reallocated from other purposes and is not an increase in the company's investment or capital expenditure plans and that the company sees this initiative as a massive effort that reflects how energy issues are a higher priority for its customers.

Rackforce also recently announced it has deployed new quad-core servers from IBM.

Kelowna, BC and Toronto, ON - April 3, 2007 - Rackforce, a Kelowna, BC-based advanced infrastructure provider for hosting and applications, is using new quad-core servers from IBM to give its customers more processing power and reliability while reducing its electricity costs.

The new servers are three times faster than the servers Rackforce had been previously using, while using 30 percent less electricity. Rackforce has purchased 320 IBM System x servers in 2006 for $1.2 million, and expects to purchase 600 more this year.

Kelowna, BC and Toronto, ON - April 3, 2007 - Rackforce, a Kelowna, BC-based advanced infrastructure provider for hosting and applications, is using new quad-core servers from IBM to give its customers more processing power and reliability while reducing its electricity costs.

The new servers are three times faster than the servers Rackforce had been previously using, while using 30 percent less electricity. Rackforce has purchased 320 IBM System x servers in 2006 for $1.2 million, and expects to purchase 600 more this year.

"One of our highest costs is powering our data centres, and anything we can do to save electricity makes a big impact on costs," said Tim Dufour, President of Rackforce. "Our first priority is to provide our customers with the best value and the most reliable hosting available, and the second is being as environmentally responsible and energy efficient as possible. Our new IBM quad-core servers help us achieve those priorities."

Rackforce has a worldwide customer base and at any one time can host more than 500,000 active sessions. The data centres are located in the interior of British Columbia and are powered by clean and reliable hydro power. According to Rackforce, customers always have consistent access to their servers and don't need to worry about earthquakes or other disruptive events causing the data centres to become unavailable.

About RackForce Networks Inc.

RackForce is one of the fastest growing advanced infrastructure providers in North America. From its three data centres, the company provides 24/7 dedicated servers, virtual private servers and collocation services to a world-wide customer base. Due to its unique location in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada it has access to highly reliable redundant hydro power feeds, a well educated work force and excellent world-class carrier networks.

About IBM

For more information about IBM, go to www.ibm.com

For further information, please contact:

Leslie Plant
IBM Canada Ltd.
laplant@ca.ibm.com
416-478-9840

Brian Fry
Rackforce Networks Inc.
bfry@rackforce.com
250-717-2340

Kelowna BC Canada - November 30, 2006 - Advanced Infrastructure Provider RackForce announced the launch of its new 5100 series of power servers. The 5100 series IBM server comes with the new Woodcrest Xeon processor, dual SCSI Drives and 10Mpbs Unmetered Bandwidth for a limited time introductory price of $299 per month ($399 regular price). The Woodcrest processor is reported to give 150% to 300% greater processing power than standard Xeon CPUs.

Kelowna BC Canada - November 30, 2006 - Advanced Infrastructure Provider RackForce announced the launch of its new 5100 series of power servers. The 5100 series IBM server comes with the new Woodcrest Xeon processor, dual SCSI Drives and 10Mpbs Unmetered Bandwidth for a limited time introductory price of $299 per month ($399 regular price). The Woodcrest processor is reported to give 150% to 300% greater processing power than standard Xeon CPUs.

"RackForce has a reputation for offering the latest technology for the best possible price. This is the best price/performance package we have ever put together", explained RackForce President, Tim Dufour. "They are ready now to handle the extra load caused by the holiday rush."

The 5100 series servers also come with a large number of options, including: Dual CPUs, 6 operating system choices and 100Mbps metered bandwidth. The full range of options can be viewed by visiting RackForce's custom build page at https://www.rackforce.com/server_build.html?do=5100.

"In addition to standard web hosting our customer information is showing a remarkable growth in the Software as a Service (SaaS) market and these servers are perfectly suited for hosting and delivering applications", added Dufour.

All the details on the 5100 series server can be found at www.rackforce.com.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of the fastest growing Advanced Infrastructure Providers in North America. From its three data centers the company provides 24/7 dedicated servers, virtual private servers and collocation services to a world-wide customer base. Due to its unique location in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada it has access to highly reliable redundant hydro power feeds, a well educated work force and excellent world-class carrier networks.

October 12, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting automation software provider Ensim (ensim.com) announced on Thursday that Web hosting provider Rackforce Hosting (rackforce.com) has selected Ensim Pro X as the preferred control panel for its dynamic dedicated server brand of Windows virtual servers.

October 12, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting automation software provider Ensim (ensim.com) announced on Thursday that Web hosting provider Rackforce Hosting (rackforce.com) has selected Ensim Pro X as the preferred control panel for its dynamic dedicated server brand of Windows virtual servers.

Earlier this year, RackForce launched a new virtual private server based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. The Web host decided to deploy Ensim Pro X for secure architecture, simplified management controls, customization features and its certification for both Windows and Linux operating systems.

"Rackforce is known for being an innovator in the Web hosting market, particularly for bringing new hosting solutions and technologies to market," says Dave Wippich, CEO of Ensim. "Pro X provides Rackforce with the tools to continue its reputation of building innovative hosting plans for shared, reseller and dedicated server customers."

Released in June, Ensim Pro X is the newest version of the server management and automation control panel. Certified for both Linux and Windows, Ensim Pro enables Web hosting providers, their resellers and their site owners to centrally control and automate shared hosting tasks.

Kelowna BC Canada - May 30, 2006 - Hosting Service Provider RackForce announced today that it lowered its prices on unmetered dedicated server bandwidth by up to as much as 50%. With this new pricing a dedicated 10Mbps connection on a 3GHz Xeon server is priced at $324 per month. With a 5Mbps connection it drops to $249.

Kelowna BC Canada - May 30, 2006 - Hosting Service Provider RackForce announced today that it lowered its prices on unmetered dedicated server bandwidth by up to as much as 50%. With this new pricing a dedicated 10Mbps connection on a 3GHz Xeon server is priced at $324 per month. With a 5Mbps connection it drops to $249.

"RackForce is one of a few hosting companies offering dedicated unmetered bandwidth. We have avoided the ambiguous 100Mbps "shared" bandwidth model that offers 2 Terabytes or more of transfer even though actual network performance only allows for a fraction of that. Our flat rate, unmetered model is clear simple and predictable.", explained RackForce President, Tim Dufour.

To deliver the unmetered model RackForce utilizes multi-homed, full duplex connections to multiple Tier One providers. All Internet connections are dedicated. There is no over allocation of customer service switches on the network. Each customer receives their bandwidth as allotted regardless of what bandwidth other customers use.

Randall Robinson, General Manager, clarified, "Our web analytics show there is a lot of interest in unmetered bandwidth. I have a former background in web development and hosting and in my opinion unmetered dedicated bandwidth is the only way you really know what you are getting."

The new pricing and details about unmetered bandwidth are available online at www.rackforce.com.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of the fastest growing Hosting Service Providers in North America. From its three data centers the company provides 24/7 dedicated servers, virtual private servers and collocation services to a growing world-wide customer base. Due to its unique location in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada it has access to redundant hydro power feeds, a well educated employee pool and excellent world-class carrier networks.

Kelowna BC Canada - March 16, 2006 - Today, RackForce Hosting Inc., has officially announced the launch of its new Virtual Private Server based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. RackForce is an early adopter and innovator of virtual private servers and is the first company worldwide to offer this technology to the web hosting market.

Kelowna BC Canada - March 16, 2006 - Today, RackForce Hosting Inc., has officially announced the launch of its new Virtual Private Server based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. RackForce is an early adopter and innovator of virtual private servers and is the first company worldwide to offer this technology to the web hosting market.

"Virtualization changes the economics of the hosting industry," said John Zanni, director of the Communications Sector at Microsoft Corp. "Windows Virtual Server lowers hardware and system management costs, enabling RackForce to focus its resources on the services and features that its customers truly want and need."

Windows offers the familiarity and ease of use people have come to expect from Microsoft. The strength of the Windows platform along with Virtual Server 2005 R2 provides security and isolation without the need for a dedicated physical server. Along with the broad number of supported applications and tools for hosters on the Windows platform, this makes RackForce's new dds200-W a natural choice.

"The feedback has been great and early acceptance of our new Virtual Private Server for Windows has been better than expected," explained Randall Robinson, RackForce General Manager. "With the lower cost, extended scalability and ease of use of this product, hosting resellers and application developers will undoubtedly see greater success. We expect to see major growth in this segment of the market."

Virtual Private Server for Windows is the latest addition to the RackForce Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) line of products. Named "dds200-W", it maximizes the resources of a Dual Xeon Processor server into eight separate environments. Each environment behaves exactly as a dedicated Windows server does. The package also includes Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, a 10Mbps connection, Plesk for Windows (optional) and FortiGate Firewall Intrusion Protection.

The dds200-W is now available online at www.rackforce.com.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of the fastest growing Hosting Service Providers in North America. From its three data centers the company provides 24/7 dedicated servers, virtual private servers and collocation services to a growing world-wide customer base. Due to its unique location in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada it has access to redundant hydro power feeds, a well educated employee pool and excellent world-class carrier networks.

September 28, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce Hosting Inc. announced today the opening of K3, its third data center facility in Kelowna with build out capacity for up to 6000 rack mounted servers. This new facility will provide substantially more space for its Dedicated Servers, Virtual Private Servers and Colocation services.

September 28, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce Hosting Inc. announced today the opening of K3, its third data center facility in Kelowna with build out capacity for up to 6000 rack mounted servers. This new facility will provide substantially more space for its Dedicated Servers, Virtual Private Servers and Colocation services.

K3 has been engineered to be a high availability data center including redundant dual hydropower substation connections allowing for complete power fail-over should a substation fail.

RackForce's Vice President, Brian Fry commented, "Due to high demand we have expanded to a 3rd data center as we are rapidly gaining customers who are looking for a safe environment with a low threat to natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes."

K3's first major tenant is the Kelowna Transit Exchange which is managed by BCNET ( www.bcnet.ca ). With the capability of operating at speeds up to 10,000 Gigabits per second, this new facility will link the University of British Columbia Okanagan, Okanagan College, Kelowna General Hospital, Interior Health Authority and the BCIT Aerospace Facility along with other members to the Optical Regional Advanced Network (ORAN) enabling advanced Internet-supporting world-class projects in the areas of education, health, physics, the arts and science.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of Canada's fastest growing Hosting Service Providers, offering superior 24/7 customer service and reliable network services over a redundant Gigabit Internet backbone. From its three data centers the company provides dedicated servers, virtual private servers and colocation services to a growing international customer base. Private Line (point-to-point) network services such as DS1, DS3 and Ethernet Transparent LAN Services are also available.

September 28, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce Hosting Inc., BCNET and Al Stober Construction are pleased to announce the new Kelowna Transit Exchange (KELTX) will be located in the Landmark Technology Center.

September 28, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce Hosting Inc., BCNET and Al Stober Construction are pleased to announce the new Kelowna Transit Exchange (KELTX) will be located in the Landmark Technology Center.

Operating at up to 10 Gigabits per second, this new facility - RackForce's third data centre - located in the Landmark Technology Centre, will link UBC Okanagan, Okanagan College, Kelowna General Hospital, Interior Health Authority and the BCIT Aerospace Facility along with other members to the Optical Regional Advanced Network (ORAN) enabling advanced Internet-supporting world-class projects in the areas of education, health, physics, the arts and science. Business also benefits from KELTX as it now has low cost network access to other local businesses and world class Internet services at prices only found in the largest cities.

Michael Hrybyk, President and CEO of BCNET explained, "A Transit Exchange creates a community peering opportunity to connect and share data amongst its members which equates to huge cost savings. Simply, it means that by peering with community members who are connected at the exchange, users can transfer data amongst themselves and not incur any traffic fees. We are pleased that RackForce and Al Stober Construction came up with a package for us that made it a simple and economical decision to locate in the Landmark Technology Center."

"Transit Exchanges connect local organizations to members worldwide at speeds many times faster than the commercial Internet", stated Tim Dufour, President of Kelowna's largest hosting service provider - RackForce Hosting. "KELTX is the 'network hub' for the Okanagan region. We are extremely pleased to have an important role in this significant project."

Among other exciting opportunities, the KELTX will provide the necessary infrastructure to attract large research firms that may be involved with projects available through UBC Okanagan.

Mark Stober, Vice President of Al Stober Construction said, "When Tim [Dufour] came to us and explained the Transit Exchange opportunity we knew we wanted to help in any way we could. We worked with RackForce to provide this new custom designed data center in our Landmark Technology Center. With all the special features in these buildings the KELTX is truly world class and we are excited to be involved in this very important project."

Brian Fry, Vice President of RackForce pointed out, "We have locally hired and trained additional personnel that will be working in the KELTX. As we continue to grow we are going to add more and more services that will benefit local business and contribute to the booming BC economy."

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of Canada's fastest growing Hosting Service Providers, offering superior 24/7 customer service and reliable network services over a redundant Gigabit Internet backbone. From its three data centers the company provides dedicated servers, virtual private servers and colocation services to a growing international customer base. Private Line (point-to-point) network services such as DS1, DS3 and Ethernet Transparent LAN Services are also available.

About BCNET

BCNET build high-performance networks for British Columbia's research and education institutes - enabling connections, collaboration, and innovation by facilitating technological advancement. Collectively funded by BC's universities, federal and provincial governments, BCNET is a not-for-profit society that manages the development of the province's high-speed, dedicated Optical Regional Advanced Network (ORAN). The ORNA links researchers and educators in BC, across the county and globally and enable world-class projects in the areas of science, health, physics, and education. For more information please visit our website at www.bc.net.

About Al Stober Construction

Al Stober Construction is a land development and property management company based in Kelowna, B.C. Their most recent project is the Landmark Technology Center development, a unique multi-phase office project designed and engineered to meet the unique needs of the high-tech sector. The third phase of this development is currently under construction with completion in spring 2006.

June 1, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce announced today that it is now using Dell servers for its hosting services. The Dell PowerEdge SC1425 servers will be equipped with single or dual Intel Xeon™ processors incorporating Intel's NetBurst® micro-architecture and Hyper-Threading Technology.

June 1, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce announced today that it is now using Dell servers for its hosting services. The Dell PowerEdge SC1425 servers will be equipped with single or dual Intel Xeon™ processors incorporating Intel's NetBurst® micro-architecture and Hyper-Threading Technology.

"When we started RackForce we used Dell's customized-to-each-customer model as a template for providing online dedicated servers," explained RackForce President Tim Dufour. "Up until a short time ago RackForce assembled these customized servers from brand name components but our suppliers were having trouble keeping up. Dell went out of its way to meet our needs. Now we have the best technology and can have the servers customized and online in half the time."

"More and more customers are realizing the excellent performance and value of Dell PowerEdge servers to power mission-critical infrastructure versus building their own, " said Debora Jensen, vice president of Dell's Advanced Systems Group in Canada. "Racks of servers are the 'power plants' of service providers like RackForce. Dell servers deliver the quality, cutting edge features and full support necessary to deliver that business model."

"With the load and performance demands placed on a server in today's Always ON world we needed a full-featured server. These Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge servers will outperform just about anything else out there!" boasted Rackforce sales professional Doug Alder.

The Dell servers start at $129 per month at RackForce. They also come with dual 1Gbps NIC cards and have the OS options of Fedora, Red Hat 9, and Red Hat Enterprise operating systems. Also Windows Server 2003 (Web or Standard) is available for a higher monthly fee.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of Canada's fastest growing HSPs providing next generation dedicated and virtual private server solutions for all levels of hosting resellers and enterprise customers. RackForce's Canadian data centers feature 24/7 support, fully redundant Gigabit backbone connections as well as dual grid hydropower feeds.

April 27, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - In response to increasing demand for more powerful and versatile Virtual Private Servers (VPS), RackForce has extended its line-up of VPS models with the addition of the dds500 and dds1000.

April 27, 2005 - Kelowna BC Canada - In response to increasing demand for more powerful and versatile Virtual Private Servers (VPS), RackForce has extended its line-up of VPS models with the addition of the dds500 and dds1000.

In November 2003 RackForce first introduced its own brand of VPS servers under the name Dynamic Dedicated Server or DDS. "We call them Dynamic Dedicated Servers because of our ability to dynamically migrate customers from one DDS to another", explains Brian Fry VP Sales for RackForce, "or even to a fully dedicated server seamlessly and with virtually no downtime and zero cost."

These two new servers integrate Virtuozzo with RackForce's Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) technology, resulting in a superior standard of performance and reliability. The dds500 is just one step away from a fully dedicated server with a minimum 512MB of RAM and 40GB of hard drive space. The dds1000 is very unique in that it is a fully dedicated server (a single virtual environment on a single physical host) while still incorporating all the advantages and features of RackForce's DDS technology.

"I am very excited that these servers are now being introduced. I get asked for these kinds of solutions daily and now we can provide them," exclaimed Doug Alder, a senior salesperson for RackForce. "Now our customers can scale their costs as they scale their business. From an entry level DDS model right up to a fully dedicated server without the time, trouble and expense normally associated with moving from server to server."

Both of these DDS models include your choice of either CPanel or Plesk control panels. A new server can be fully operational within minutes of starting the ordering process. RackForce's dds servers are instantly activated when the new customer order is verified by its fraud check system.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of Canada's fastest growing HSPs providing next generation dedicated and virtual private server solutions for all levels of hosting resellers and enterprise customers. RackForce's Canadian data centers feature 24/7 support, fully redundant Gigabit backbone connections as well as dual utility grid hydropower feeds.

Brian Fry, Co-founder and Vice President, RackForce

In our March featured interview, HostSearch.com talks to Rackforce.com Co-founder and Vice President Brian Fry. Brian shares how RackForce helped track Al Qaeda through Shareeah.org and the RackForce automation strategy.

Brian Fry, Co-founder and Vice President, RackForce

In our March featured interview, HostSearch.com talks to Rackforce.com Co-founder and Vice President Brian Fry. Brian shares how RackForce helped track Al Qaeda through Shareeah.org and the RackForce automation strategy.

HOSTSEARCH: Could you please briefly tell us about yourself and your role for RackForce.com?

BRIAN FRY: I have a dual role in the company. I am a co-founder and the Vice President and I manage the marketing and sales department for RackForce. My job is to take the sales goals set by the Board of Directors and turn them into reality. The marketing/sales department works closely with operations to ensure our servers, both dedicated and VPS, are meeting the demanding needs of hosting and application resellers.

HOSTSEARCH: Can you tell me about your relationship with SW Soft and their Plesk Enterprise Manager (PEM)?

BRIAN FRY: RackForce has an excellent relationship with SW-soft. We meet with their top executives on a regular basis. When we launched our dedicated server line three years ago we started with Plesk. We built a strong relationship with them and that carried into SW-Soft after the acquisition. We were the first company to launch PEM after extensive testing and planning. Unfortunately it was at the same time that SW-soft was acquiring Plesk and we decided, with SW-soft, to stop the launch since there was some uncertainty about the product’s future. PEM is doing well now and we continue to watch the product and it is still expected to make it part of our product line in the future.

HOSTSEARCH: Recently Rackforce discontinued service to the Shareeah.org website after it was made known their possible connections with Al-Qaeda and the jihad oriented message of the site. What exactly was it that put the site over the line and can you tell me about the process you went through in making your determination to quit hosting the site?

BRIAN FRY: Hosting Service Providers are much more complicated entities then some people realize. Our customers resell what we provide them and we don’t sell to the end user. However since we own our own netblocks some people think that we are also aware of every web site on our system. With more than 80,000 web sites we can’t supervise every site nor can we respond to every abuse report. We have a strict Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and react to qualified reports and take the appropriate steps. In the Shareeah.org site we were made aware of the site by the RCMP (Canada’s main law enforcement agency) and asked to leave it operating so that it could be tracked. We then removed it when the RCMP asked that it be removed.

There was an amazing amount of pressure put on the company by the press and special interest groups over this site. The CNN and the National News in Canada picked up the story. We stuck to our policies and procedures and the President and I were really pleased with the RackForce teams’ performance.

HOSTSEARCH: 4. What level of responsibility do web hosting providers have for the content they are hosting? I.e., where do you draw the line in terms of what is acceptable in terms of adult hosting, illegal(viral) adware ala MCI’s hosting of send-safe.com, spammers, political and racially motivated sites vs. allowing freedom of speech?

BRIAN FRY: We feel Freedom of Speech is a right that everyone should have but they do not have the right to break the law. We use “Applicable Laws” to determine what should be removed from RackForce systems. By applicable laws we use Canadian law, which we feel is a very fair legal system.

We remove sites that promote injury or physical harm, promote or teach illegal activities, exploit children in a negative or sexual way, infringe on copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or other intellectual property. There are a few other things that would cause us to remove a site but that pretty well sums it up.
We do not promote adult hosting but we allow it on specific servers that have the network and computing power necessary to support such a high demand requirement. This falls under freedom of speech and as long as it is legal we allow it.

HOSTSEARCH: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to you or your customers that you are based in Canada vs. the United States?  

BRIAN FRY: Our location in Kelowna, BC, Canada is a significant advantage to anyone in North America. Consider the following:

Network Quality - The network is the same network that all the big players are plugged into. Our network engineers are really good at making sure our performance is high and we continue to add more capabilities.

Electrical Power Quality – Data centers are all about reliable power. We take advantage of the abundant, clean hydropower resources that are available where we are. Most important of all is we have no threat of a grid failure like we saw two summers ago in Eastern North America. Our systems are plugged into redundant power grids. We don’t know of any other data centres that can boast this.

Human Resource Quality - Canada’s education system is solid and we have an abundant choice of well-qualified people who want to live in beautiful Kelowna. Our President sits on the advisory committees for the Okanagan College/University of British Columbia. We are able to hire great people who want to be part of an exciting company.

Seismic Stability – We are in western North America but we are one of the few Pacific Time Zone data centers not located on an earthquake fault. If you think about this for a moment, earthquakes threaten a large portion of the world’s computing power between Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles. When you are dependent on computer systems for your financial well-being why would you locate in one of these areas. Kelowna is great choice. It is stable with very little chance of experiencing an earthquake or major disaster.

The four points above combine to give our customers the best possible hosting experience.

HOSTSEARCH: With over 75% of email estimated to be spam and an increasing variety and severity of viruses being released what priority level do you place on providing security vs. customer service or management applications to your clients?

BRIAN FRY: Security and management applications have to work seamlessly together. RackForce’s complete data center is protected by a hardware (ASIC based) perimeter firewall, which is used to manage network threats. It also gives Network management the ability to see and manage things that smaller data centers could not. For a small fee ($25 or less) customers can then choose to have additional levels of protection added to their specific server to manage security threats, viruses and spam

HOSTSEARCH: Can you tell me a bit about your datacenter and your hardware?

BRIAN FRY: We operate two data centers in Kelowna with up to two more planned for this year. The NOC is manned 24/7/365 by expert technicians. We promote 99.99% uptime and are aggressively moving to carrier grade levels of service while maintaining very affordable pricing.

Our core routing equipment is state-of-the-art but we don’t mention brand or models for security reasons. Needless to say we have a great deal of flexibility in how we support our customers due to the good equipment and design. We run multiple redundant backbones with 1.7Gbps capacity and we continuously add more. Our edge routers are layer 3 and Gbps capable.

Our power systems are second to none. We have the standard UPSs and diesel generators but with the dual power grid I mentioned earlier the most serious threat to a hosting service provider is eliminated.

HOSTSEARCH: With technology advancing so rapidly in terms of data storage, processing speed and network speed how do you see the role of web hosting providers changing in the next 5-10 years?

BRIAN FRY: The hosting provider must evolve from making the majority of their revenue from hosting web sites to hosting applications and providing storage and disaster recovery solutions. The Internet first leveled the playing field for small to medium size companies but now the IT costs are taking it back out of reach. The hosting service provider has the ability to create the “Economies of Scale” to make computing affordable for every business. We see this as an integral part of our role in the Internet business.

HOSTSEARCH: What is your company’s forte as compared to other web hosts?

BRIAN FRY: Automation! We have our own development/integration team and we automate everything we can so there is less human intervention and best possible support. For example: Our Instant Activation System will put a most servers online within 10 minutes after the customer orders and passes the fraud check. Our monitoring systems will place a ticket automatically for the customer and the support team will often fix the problem before the customer is aware there is a problem.

HOSTSEARCH: In terms of server operating systems, how do you see the Microsoft vs. Unix war going in the next few years?

BRIAN FRY: Microsoft will continuously take market share in the data center as more and more applications are centralized. People are used to seeing Microsoft on their desktop and Small and Medium size Enterprises will want Windows servers running them.

HOSTSEARCH: What can we expect to see from Rackforce in 2005?

BRIAN FRY: We will be adding 2 more data centers to accommodate our growth and need for enterprise class services. We’ll also be adding network and collocation to New York (Newark, New Jersey) to provide “single hop” performance from the East Coast. We will launch Windows hosting and VPS (Virtual Private Servers) by April and a short time later we will launch the first Windows applications. We will also be adding Oracle database support.

2004 was a great year for the company and we expect 2005 to be even better.

January 21, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Canadian wholesale Web host RackForce (rackforce.com) announced on Friday it has enhanced its managed FortiGate ASIC accelerated antivirus firewalls, enabling its managed security services to handle increasing volumes of traffic.

January 21, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Canadian wholesale Web host RackForce (rackforce.com) announced on Friday it has enhanced its managed FortiGate ASIC accelerated antivirus firewalls, enabling its managed security services to handle increasing volumes of traffic.

"Two things really fueled the decision to upgrade so quickly - our rapid growth in the VPS and dedicated server markets," says Davin Overland, GM of RackForce, which first introduced FortiGate Services in its data centers in September 2004. "Perhaps more importantly to meet the increasing demands resulting from expanded use of real time applications."

RackForce offers a variety of managed security services including firewall with intrusion detection and virus filtering or spam tagging. The services can be ordered individually, in any combination, or as a complete package.

December 15, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Canadian Web hosting and Internet service provider RackForce (rackforce.com), a Canadian hosting and Internet service provider, launched on Wednesday the new ddsStorm to meet the demand for cPanel based Virtual Private Servers.

December 15, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Canadian Web hosting and Internet service provider RackForce (rackforce.com), a Canadian hosting and Internet service provider, launched on Wednesday the new ddsStorm to meet the demand for cPanel based Virtual Private Servers.

Rackforce says the new Dynamic Dedicated Server offering couples Virtuozzo VPS technology with CPanel and WebHost Manager, and features 20GB of space and unmetered bandwidth.

"Our original cPanel VPS server, the ddsHurricane, has been very popular and we needed another server to bridge to our fully dedicated ddsServers," says Brian Fry, VP of sales. "The value of the dds scaleable hosting concept is starting to be understood now and hosting companies welcome the cost savings, flexibility and security."

In November 2003, RackForce introduced its lineup of VPS servers under the brand name dds for Dynamic Dedicated Server, enabling clients to upgrade from any dds account to another dds server, with the same control panel, no downtime and no cost.

A new server can be fully operational within minutes of starting the ordering process, says RackForce. The company's dds servers are instantly activated once a new customer order is verified by its fraud check system.

December 1, 2004 - Kelowna BC Canada - In response to increasing bandwidth demands placed on HSPs, ASPs and Content Delivery Providers, RackForce announced today the addition of a dedicated 3Mbps unmetered bandwidth option for their dedicated server customers.

December 1, 2004 - Kelowna BC Canada - In response to increasing bandwidth demands placed on HSPs, ASPs and Content Delivery Providers, RackForce announced today the addition of a dedicated 3Mbps unmetered bandwidth option for their dedicated server customers.

"The unmetered bandwidth model has always been an integral part of the RackForce strategy to provide our customers with flexible and scalable options that fit their company's needs" explained RackForce President, Tim Dufour. "Having a fixed monthly cost for delivering services is a must for most businesses. Our unmetered bandwidth offerings help RackForce clients manage costs while at the same time allowing them to rapidly scale their services to suit the changing dynamics of the Internet."

"The challenge I see with bandwidth," states RackForce Network Manager, "is much of the time you don't need a lot. But it's those peak times where traffic spikes and when most e-business is conducted that you need the headroom. If your bandwidth connection becomes saturated during one of these peaks, your Website or online service essentially becomes inaccessible. Not a very pleasant experience at perhaps your most valuable time."

The new 3Mbps option will join RackForce's current unmetered bandwidth offerings of 1.5 Mbps, 5Mbps and 10Mbps. "We have had many clients who have outgrown the 1.5Mbps unmetered plan but were not quite ready for the 5Mbps" says Brian Fry, VP Sales. "The new 3Mbps option will fill an important gap in our client's natural growth and progression, and is very affordable at only $75 per month. Best of all, there'll be no surprises on their bandwidth bill at the end of the month!"

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is one of Canada's fastest growing HSPs providing next generation dedicated and virtual dedicated server solutions for all levels of hosting resellers and enterprise customers. RackForce's Canadian data centers feature fully redundant Gigabit backbone connections as well as dual utility grid hydro-power feeds for the ultimate in performance, reliability and uptime.

October 7, 2004 - Kelowna, BC Canada - RackForce announced today the launch of rackforcetraining.com, a live online classroom with an expert RackForce instructor who teaches the fundamentals of Plesk 7 Reloaded. Attendees will be able to ask questions by phone or instant messenger and see the solutions right on their screen via an online classroom tool that displays the instructor's screen.

October 7, 2004 - Kelowna, BC Canada - RackForce announced today the launch of rackforcetraining.com, a live online classroom with an expert RackForce instructor who teaches the fundamentals of Plesk 7 Reloaded. Attendees will be able to ask questions by phone or instant messenger and see the solutions right on their screen via an online classroom tool that displays the instructor's screen.

Instructor Shar Houlihan said, "I have been helping people get their web site online for eight years. Now, with online training tools and the easy to use Plesk interface we will be giving customers the ability to completely manage their online business. No longer just Internet passengers they will be the drivers. Who knows what horizons this will open to them. Very exciting times."

The first hour-long session will start on Monday October 11th at 9:00am PDT (GMT -7) and there will be a new topic each day with an open session on Friday for the really tough questions. To sign up for a free training session please go to www.rackforcetraining.com.

September 8, 2004 - Kelowna BC Canada - After extensive research and testing, RackForce is pleased to announce the launch of its new managed security services based on the award-winning FortiGate series of ASIC accelerated anti-virus firewalls.

September 8, 2004 - Kelowna BC Canada - After extensive research and testing, RackForce is pleased to announce the launch of its new managed security services based on the award-winning FortiGate series of ASIC accelerated anti-virus firewalls.

"Our customers are looking to us for leadership in network threat reduction. We needed a product powerful enough to be placed at the network edge and flexible enough to keep pace with ever-changing Internet threats. The FortiGate platform closes the door to spam, viruses, and network attacks in real-time without affecting server or network performance," stated the Network Manager at RackForce. "The FortiGate products can be deployed in a matter of minutes for any RackForce customer. Many of our customers see instant benefits."

RackForce is now offering the following managed security services; firewall with intrusion detection, virus filtering, or spam tagging, in any combination or the full package. With the full package the system can detect and eliminate the most damaging content-based threats originating from email and web traffic, and unlike host-based solutions this is all done transparently without affecting performance of the server.

As part of our ongoing commitment to our customers, we are pleased to announce the much anticipated upgrade to the RackForce Customer Service Center (CSC).

As part of our ongoing commitment to our customers, we are pleased to announce the much anticipated upgrade to the RackForce Customer Service Center (CSC). Many customers' suggestions and ideas have been incorporated into this new version together with significant ergonomic and workflow improvements to enhance the usability of the CSC and make our customer's job easier.

New features include: Integrated support and billing ticket management; centralized ticket history viewing; easier ordering and upgrade capabilities; enhanced server, security and bandwidth reporting; improved account management tools; expanded user forum; and many more features.

RackForce announced today the launch of its newest Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) dubbed the ddsHurricane. This virtual server model is specially engineered and tested to provide maximum performance for cPanel operating on Virtuozzo's Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology.

RackForce announced today the launch of its newest Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) dubbed the ddsHurricane. This virtual server model is specially engineered and tested to provide maximum performance for cPanel operating on Virtuozzo's Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology.

"As with other servers in the DDS family, customers can start with an entry level virtual server, like the ddsHurricane, and upgrade to a Fully Dedicated Server like our ddsVenom, with no configuration changes, no downtime and no cost for the transition. We know that success oriented resellers need scaleable servers this is why we have put so much effort into engineering our 'DDS' model, we believe it's the next generation in hosting solutions" states Brian Fry, Vice President of Sales.

RackForce Hosting Inc. has added an additional 500KW diesel generator and a second, fully independent hydro-electric power feed to its data center in Kelowna, British Columbia. The severe power outages experienced recently on the East and West Coast as well as concerns with the continued vulnerability of utility networks in general has reinforced RackForce's commitment to build additional redundancy into its power systems.

RackForce Hosting Inc. has added an additional 500KW diesel generator and a second, fully independent hydro-electric power feed to its data center in Kelowna, British Columbia. The severe power outages experienced recently on the East and West Coast as well as concerns with the continued vulnerability of utility networks in general has reinforced RackForce's commitment to build additional redundancy into its power systems. "One of the reasons we initially located our dedicated hosting facility in this area", notes Tim Dufour, president and CEO of RackForce, "was the abundance of clean, reliable power sources. Access to dual hydro-utility grids is a rare occurrence and it made sense that we took advantage of this asset to ensure the reliability of our hosting services." The new power feed will supplement RackForce's existing redundant diesel and UPS power backup systems.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is a wholesale hosting provider that provides the dynamic dedicated and virtual private hosting solutions required for hosting resellers and small and medium enterprises. Located in Canada's "Silicon Vineyard", Kelowna BC, RackForce is one of Canada's largest privately owned hosting companies.

As Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology has evolved, its advantages over shared hosting and, in some ways, even dedicated hosting have become increasingly well known within the hosting reseller community. Despite these advantages, VPS hosting solutions remain a small fraction of total hosting sales. In part, this is because the complexity of the technology and the lack of affordable GUI-based tools for deploying and self-managing Virtual Environments (VEs) has limited the ability of hosting resellers to resell high quality VPS solutions to their clients.

As Virtual Private Server (VPS) technology has evolved, its advantages over shared hosting and, in some ways, even dedicated hosting have become increasingly well known within the hosting reseller community. Despite these advantages, VPS hosting solutions remain a small fraction of total hosting sales. In part, this is because the complexity of the technology and the lack of affordable GUI-based tools for deploying and self-managing Virtual Environments (VEs) has limited the ability of hosting resellers to resell high quality VPS solutions to their clients.

To help push open the door to VPS reselling, RackForce has re-tooled its Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) offerings using the latest release of SWSoft's enterprise-grade VE technology: Virtuozzo 2.6. RackForce DDSplus servers now include the new web-based Virtuozzo Power Panel free-of-charge. This Power Panel is designed to allow hosting resellers to deploy and manage multiple VEs easily on the same physical host without investing $1000+ in a full-blown Virtuozzo Management Consol. RackForce DDSplus dedicated servers also come standard with the latest version of Plesk which allows an end-user to monitor, manage and reboot their virtual private server from within their hosting control panel. Clients can purchase additional Virtuozzo and Plesk or cPanel licenses for their DDSplus server on a discounted month-to-month basis directly from RackForce in 10, 30, 100 and 300 license packs or singly. A VPS enabled DDSplus dedicated server with Virtuozzo, Plesk or cPanel an Intel P4 2.4 Ghz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 80GB hard drive starts at only $149.00 a month.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is a wholesale hosting provider that provides the dynamic dedicated and virtual private hosting solutions required for hosting resellers and small and medium enterprises. Located in Canada's "Silicon Vineyard", Kelowna BC, RackForce is one of Canada's largest privately owned hosting companies.

As reported by The Middle East Media Research Institute ( http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SR3104) and the Canadian Free Press ( http://www.canadafreepress.com/cover_storys.htm), RackForce Hosting Inc. (www.rackforce.com) of Kelowna, B.C. Canada was hosting two of eight terrorist web sites hosted in North America. The web sites in question are www.alqassam.net (the Arabic language website of Izz Al-din Al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas) and www.moqawama.net (a pro-Hizbullah website).

In no way does RackForce support or have any connection to the Hamas or Hizbullah organizations or their military wings. RackForce is a wholesale hosting provider and although it acknowledges the fact that no one owns or controls the Internet and it cannot actively review, censor, edit or take responsibility for the activities or content of its hosting resellers, RackForce does actively enforce its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). With regard to the Al-Qassam and Hizbullah web sites, RackForce sought the guidance of both the RCMP and Canada's Solicitor General's National Security Directorate prior to the July 16, 2004 report by Middle East Media Research Institute and continues to cooperate fully with authorities. At this time, no authority has requested RackForce take action to restrict the Internet broadcast of these web sites.

As reported by The Middle East Media Research Institute ( http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SR3104) and the Canadian Free Press ( http://www.canadafreepress.com/cover_storys.htm), RackForce Hosting Inc. (www.rackforce.com) of Kelowna, B.C. Canada was hosting two of eight terrorist web sites hosted in North America. The web sites in question are www.alqassam.net (the Arabic language website of Izz Al-din Al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas) and www.moqawama.net (a pro-Hizbullah website).

In no way does RackForce support or have any connection to the Hamas or Hizbullah organizations or their military wings. RackForce is a wholesale hosting provider and although it acknowledges the fact that no one owns or controls the Internet and it cannot actively review, censor, edit or take responsibility for the activities or content of its hosting resellers, RackForce does actively enforce its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). With regard to the Al-Qassam and Hizbullah web sites, RackForce sought the guidance of both the RCMP and Canada's Solicitor General's National Security Directorate prior to the July 16, 2004 report by Middle East Media Research Institute and continues to cooperate fully with authorities. At this time, no authority has requested RackForce take action to restrict the Internet broadcast of these web sites.

As of July 21st 2004, RackForce has deferred to the judgment of the Canadian government which lists Hamas and Hizbullah as terrorist organizations ( http://www.psepc-sppcc.gc.ca/national_security/counter-terrorism/Entities_e.asp) and has begun the process of suspending www.alqassam.net and www.moqawama.net from its network for violating the following section of RackForce's AUP:

RackForce may terminate accounts that have links to or content that:

• Is unlawful or is considered offensive by the web community.
• Promotes injury or physical harm against any group or individual.
• Promotes or teaches illegal activities.
• Exploits or depicts children in a negative/sexual way.
• Infringes on copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or other intellectual property including pirated computer programs, cracker utilities, warez and software serial numbers or registration codes.
• Violates any law, statute, ordinance or regulation governing the Reseller's business or activities, including without limitation the laws and regulations governing export control, unfair competition, false advertising, consumer protection, issuance or sale of securities, trade in firearms, privacy, data transfer and telecommunications.

RackForce will also modify its AUP to more explicitly prohibit terrorist websites on its network and is requesting that the actual Hosting Service Provider for these websites remove them from RackForce's network at the soonest possible time.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is a wholesale hosting provider that provides the dedicated and virtual private hosting solutions required for small and medium business and hosting resellers to grow their e-business. Located in Canada's "Silicon Vineyard", Kelowna BC, RackForce is one of Canada's largest privately owned hosting companies.

As part of its drive to continually improve its quality of service and deliver world-class network reliability and performance, RackForce is excited to announce a significant upgrade to its core networking infrastructure. This week, RackForce installed RiverStone's flagship RS38000 router. RiverStone is a leading provider of carrier-class network equipment and the RS38000 is among the world's most powerful routers.

As part of its drive to continually improve its quality of service and deliver world-class network reliability and performance, RackForce is excited to announce a significant upgrade to its core networking infrastructure. This week, RackForce installed RiverStone's flagship RS38000 router. RiverStone is a leading provider of carrier-class network equipment and the RS38000 is among the world's most powerful routers.

The RS 38000 has an awesome 170Gbps of switching capacity, is NEBS/ETSI compliant and features fully redundant processing, control modules, switch fabrics, and power supplies for an estimated MTBF of over 22 years. Overall, it is built for the most demanding, high performance environments. Installing the RS 38000 will significantly increase RackForce's total network capacity, performance and reliability.

With the introduction of its new website RackForce has restructured its hosting services to offer a better quality of service to the reseller and small business hosting market. After years of providing shared and dedicated hosting solutions, serious flaws were identified in these conventional hosting models. While shared hosting lacks the security, stability, flexibility and performance necessary for any significant e-business, dedicated hosting remains too complex and its total cost of ownership too high for most resellers and the vast majority of small businesses.

With the introduction of its new website RackForce has restructured its hosting services to offer a better quality of service to the reseller and small business hosting market. After years of providing shared and dedicated hosting solutions, serious flaws were identified in these conventional hosting models. While shared hosting lacks the security, stability, flexibility and performance necessary for any significant e-business, dedicated hosting remains too complex and its total cost of ownership too high for most resellers and the vast majority of small businesses.

RackForce's new DDS hosting model addresses these issues in a new and efficient way. Through its partnership with SWsoft and the creative application of enterprise-grade Virtuozzo technology, RackForce has developed a feature set for its range of DDS and DDSplus dedicated servers that combine (and in many ways enhance) the flexibility, stability, security and performance of dedicated hosting with the value of shared hosting. (See DDS Features). RackForce believes the DDS is the future of hosting and is proud to bring this superior platform to our clients.

March 1, 2004 - Kelowna, BC, Canada - RackForce Hosting Inc. has launched a new family of dedicated hosting services under the DDS brand name. According to RackForce's President and CEO, Tim Dufour, "DDS comes from 'Dynamic Dedicated Server' and is the result of RackForce's long-term investment in technologies that promise superior value in terms of stability, performance, ease of use and cost of ownership." DDS dedicated servers start at $24.95 and include a number of features that go beyond traditional entry-level hosting solutions. For example, DDS dedicated servers include complete upgrade and data protection services.

March 1, 2004 - Kelowna, BC, Canada - RackForce Hosting Inc. has launched a new family of dedicated hosting services under the DDS brand name. According to RackForce's President and CEO, Tim Dufour, "DDS comes from 'Dynamic Dedicated Server' and is the result of RackForce's long-term investment in technologies that promise superior value in terms of stability, performance, ease of use and cost of ownership." DDS dedicated servers start at $24.95 and include a number of features that go beyond traditional entry-level hosting solutions. For example, DDS dedicated servers include complete upgrade and data protection services.

Upgrade protection on DDS accounts means clients can upgrade from any DDS dedicated server to another at no extra charge and with virtually no downtime. RackForce sees this as an important benefit for hosting resellers trying to grow their hosting business. As RackForce's General Manager points out "Moving domains from one server to another is typically a frustrating, time consuming and costly process. But with DDS, we can 'drag and drop' your entire hosting environment, OS and all, from one server to another."

In addition to upgrade protection, a robust backup solution is included with every DDS account. It has been RackForce's experience that most backup solutions still result in a significant amount of downtime for clients because they only restore certain directories and not the vital 'OS level' server configurations that are often lost or compromised by security breaches and data corruption. In contrast, DDS's backup solution 'mirrors' the entire hosting environment and thus restores are fully functional.

In addition to this advanced upgrade and data protection, Brian Fry, RackForce's Vice President, believes it is "the security, performance and administrative control of a DDS dedicated server that provides hosting resellers and the small business market superior value for their hosting dollar." Unlike 'shared' or 'virtual' hosting solutions, DDS servers have dedicated processing, memory and storage as well as their own operating systems and web, mail, FTP and database services. Each DDS server also comes with two dedicated IPs so clients can host their own primary and secondary DNS servers. Also clients have 'root level' access to DDS servers. Clients can install software or configure their hosting environments from the command line to suit their hosting needs. Each DDS server also comes with administrative access to a powerful web-based control panel, such as Plesk or cPanel.

For additional information please visit rackforce.com and chat online with a sales representative, email sales@rackforce or phone 1.800.941.1921 (North America) or 1.250.717.2340 (International).

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

RackForce is a wholesale hosting provider focused on providing resellers with the "next generation" hosting services required to grow their e-business. RackForce has built its business on excellent customer service and sustains its phenomenal growth rate largely through word-of-mouth and repeat customers.

To meet the demands of a growing company, RackForce has reorganized its management team. RackForce has appointed Davin Overland as a new general manager who is responsible for all of RackForce's day-to-day operations, including human resources. He has many years of experience in the hosting industry and has significant expertise on both its technical and business side. He will make an immediate impact on RackForce's quality of service.

To meet the demands of a growing company, RackForce has reorganized its management team. RackForce has appointed Davin Overland  as a new general manager who is responsible for all of RackForce's day-to-day operations, including human resources. He has many years of experience in the hosting industry and has significant expertise on both its technical and business side. He will make an immediate impact on RackForce's quality of service.

The new Network Manager assumes the overall responsibility of the network. He has many years of network and system administration experience. He brings a new focus and dedication to keeping RackForce's critical systems secure and running 24x7x365.

The RackForce management team is committed to growing RackForce into one of the world's most respected hosting companies.

December 17, 2003 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce announced today that is has partnered with SWsoft to deliver truly Dynamic Hosting Solutions. For the first time a hosting reseller can start with a small VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) account and grow seamlessly into racks of powerful dedicated servers without the risk or expense of doing domain transfers from one server to another. Using SWsoft's enterprise grade Virtual Environment (VE) software, RackForce has engineered a hosting solution that effectively eliminates the downtime and cost of growth for hosting resellers.

December 17, 2003 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce announced today that is has partnered with SWsoft to deliver truly Dynamic Hosting Solutions. For the first time a hosting reseller can start with a small VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server) account and grow seamlessly into racks of powerful dedicated servers without the risk or expense of doing domain transfers from one server to another. Using SWsoft's enterprise grade Virtual Environment (VE) software, RackForce has engineered a hosting solution that effectively eliminates the downtime and cost of growth for hosting resellers.

"One of our goals was to deliver instantly scaleable hosting solutions. In the past, we've seen customers struggle for weeks and spend thousands of dollars trying to migrate domains from one server to another. In our business of low cost, high availability hosting this was unacceptable. Through the creative application of SWsoft's leading edge Virtuozzo technology we have solved this problem at a price no different than traditional dedicated or virtual dedicated hosting", said Tim Dufour, RackForce President.

Rackforce resellers can start with a $24.95 VDS and move seamlessly to larger VDS or DDS (Dynamic Dedicated Server) platforms as they grow. As a result, Resellers can pay for the level of service they need today and not worry about the costs and difficulties of moving to a more powerful server. "In so many ways our VDS and DDS offerings are a huge improvement over the traditional web hosting server" explained RackForce Support Manager, Ian Wilson. "What used to take days can now be done in minutes and the security and reliability of Virtuozzo is outstanding."

Resellers can also sell the same dynamic hosting solutions to their clients. All RackForce DDS branded servers are VDS enabled, i.e. they can be divided dynamically into multiple Virtual Dedicated Servers running separate kernels, control panels and Operating Systems side-by-side. As a result, Resellers have the potential to generate more revenue from DDS branded servers while end-users benefit from the improved security and reliability created by fully isolating each Virtual Environment.

"RackForce and SWsoft are on the cutting edge of Web Hosting Automation, carving out unique and powerful solutions to hosting specific issues," said Serguei Beloussov, Founder and CEO of SWsoft Inc. "Innovation is what SWsoft and Virtuozzo are all about and this partnership with RackForce reinforces our commitment to developing the finest automation products in the world."

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

In 2002 RackForce was one of the world's fastest growing hosting service providers. Specializing in Linux dedicated servers; RackForce grew 75% in 2002 according to Netcraft. RackForce focuses on customer service and custom hosting solutions and sustains its phenomenal growth rate largely through word-of-mouth and repeat customers.

RackForce's Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) is a new generation of dedicated hosting. In partnership with SWsoft, RackForce has developed a DDS platform using Virtuozzo (VE) Technology to bring a new standard of performance, reliability, security and features to the dedicated server market.

RackForce's Dynamic Dedicated Server (DDS) is a new generation of dedicated hosting. In partnership with SWsoft, RackForce has developed a DDS platform using Virtuozzo (VE) Technology to bring a new standard of performance, reliability, security and features to the dedicated server market.

• DDS has Dynamic Scalability. Complete OS environments can be quickly moved between DDS enabled physical machines with virtually NO downtime.
• DDS is VDS Enabled. A DDS server has the ability to divided into multiple Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS) dynamically with Virtuozzo's advanced fair-share technology.
• DDS is Completely Functional. Each DDS enabled server comes with complete dedicated server functionality - root access, re-bootable, ability to install any application, change any file.

RackForce is proud to present its online Customer Service Center (CSC).

RackForce is proud to present its online Customer Service Center (CSC).

Features of CSC include:

• Advanced support tickets system
• Manage Support and Billing Trouble Tickets
• Modify Billing and Client Information
• Review Billing Reports and History
• Get Server Performance, Security and Bandwidth Usage Reports
• Manage Multiple Accounts with a Single Client ID and Password
• Open New Accounts and Order Services at Special "Client Only" Prices
• Upgrade or Cancel Current Services

July 8, 2003 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce, a Plesk Platinum Partner is now offering Plesk PSA 6.0 as its standard hosting control panel and providing FREE upgrades to all existing clients using earlier versions of the award winning Plesk PSA control panel.

July 8, 2003 - Kelowna BC Canada - RackForce, a Plesk Platinum Partner is now offering Plesk PSA 6.0 as its standard hosting control panel and providing FREE upgrades to all existing clients using earlier versions of the award winning Plesk PSA control panel.

Tim Dufour, President of RackForce, said, " Plesk (SWsoft) has delivered another quality product that provides all the features necessary for a successful hosting company. The new customizable interface, anti-spam, security, and traffic counting are key features every hosting reseller will appreciate. RackForce's mandate is to provide the best customer service at the lowest prices possible and we see the Plesk (SWsoft) line of products as the best way to do this."

"Offering the Plesk PSA 6.0 upgrade for FREE is part of our commitment to our customers to provide the very best customer service. We need to make sure they have the right tools to grow their hosting business. Their growth is our growth," added Brian Fry, Vice President of Sales.

About RackForce Hosting Inc.

In 2002 RackForce was one of the world's fastest growing hosting service providers. Specializing in Linux dedicated servers; it grew 75% in 2002 according to Netcraft. RackForce focuses on customer service and flexible hosting solutions to sustain its phenomenal growth rate largely by word-of-mouth and repeat customers.

RackForce is pleased to announce the grand opening of "K2".

RackForce is pleased to announce the grand opening of "K2". K2 is our second world class data center in the Landmark Technology Center. K2 is a multi-homed, gigabit-capable data center with a UPS power system that is fed by two independent hydroelectric power companies and a backup diesel generator. K2 also features redundant geothermic cooling systems and 24x7 onsite security and network monitoring.

February 26, 2003 -- Hosting Service Provider RackForce Hosting Inc. announced today that it has signed a major agreement with Plesk, Inc. to integrate Plesk's exciting new product, the Plesk Enterprise Manager (PEM), into its highly reliable data center infrastructure.

"RackForce is an organization that has excelled through innovation and is an ideal candidate for the PEM software, said Plesk's CEO and Cofounder, Dmitri Simonenko. "We seek partnerships with innovative, progressive companies and RackForce Hosting certainly fits the bill. By deploying PEM, RackForce immediately realizes added value for their reseller channel. The software's ability to manage everything from their switch and router hardware to the deployment of entire corporate hosting infrastructures corresponds with RackForce's aggressive forward looking corporate outlook."

February 26, 2003 -- Hosting Service Provider RackForce Hosting Inc. announced today that it has signed a major agreement with Plesk, Inc. to integrate Plesk's exciting new product, the Plesk Enterprise Manager (PEM), into its highly reliable data center infrastructure.

"RackForce is an organization that has excelled through innovation and is an ideal candidate for the PEM software, said Plesk's CEO and Cofounder, Dmitri Simonenko. "We seek partnerships with innovative, progressive companies and RackForce Hosting certainly fits the bill. By deploying PEM, RackForce immediately realizes added value for their reseller channel. The software's ability to manage everything from their switch and router hardware to the deployment of entire corporate hosting infrastructures corresponds with RackForce's aggressive forward looking corporate outlook."

Through its sales and marketing tools, 24/7 live support and in-house customized servers, RackForce has seen 300% growth in 2002, 150% in the last quarter alone. The company has had to act quickly to keep up and is adding another data center at the beginning of March 2003. Through a partnership with Plesk and its new PEM product it will be able to maintain this growth rate while expanding the services it provides.

"Up until now RackForce has relied heavily on its talented development team to evolve its hosting services, administration and sales systems. I think we are known as a company that provides high quality dedicated servers and support for a great price. Now, with the addition of PEM, we will be giving our customers the ability to provide a privately branded suite of hosting services with unmatched service and support," said Tim Dufour, President & CEO of RackForce Hosting Inc. "We looked at them all including SWSoft's Virtuozzo/HSPComplete, Ensim's ServerXchange and others. No one has the breadth of capabilities out of the box, the ability to meet all of our needs today, or the architecture to support our future needs for customization, expansion, or integration", added Tim. "The innovation that Plesk brings to bare with PEM builds on their reputation as the leader in Hosting Automation and now Distributed Hosting."

In addition to its current Reseller customer base, RackForce will be teaming up with web hosting and design companies that are looking to provide state-of-the-art hosting and support while simplifying all aspects of the process. RackForce's Operations Manager enthusiastically stated, "Under this new model a reseller could add a firewall, a shopping cart and a separate email server to their customer's web site with a simple point and click. No RackForce personnel will be required. Even the reseller's customer will be able to add services and the billing system will automatically update, bill and pay the reseller. This makes everyone's job a whole lot easier, especially mine."

Over the next few months RackForce will make available to its resellers the new PEM service as well as the tools and techniques that have led to RackForce's explosive growth. "We'll be working with our current customer base as well as new resellers that see the potential of this new model. We empower our Reseller customer with the ability to auto-provision servers and services as they see fit for their customers. In addition we offer a completely integrated private-label billing system with 24/7 tech support so the Reseller can offer value added services and support level guarantees to their customers. ," added Brian Fry, RackForce's Vice President Sales and Marketing.

The Okanagan Science & Technology Council fosters an environment that supports science and technology initiatives by acting as a representative and advocate for the interests of members and the business community as a whole.

The Okanagan Science & Technology Council fosters an environment that supports science and technology initiatives by acting as a representative and advocate for the interests of members and the business community as a whole. OSTEC's mission is to foster the development of the Okanagan region as a globally competitive centre of excellence in the research, development and application of science, technology and innovation.

Rackforce welcomes Frank Estergard to the RackForce management team.

Rackforce welcomes Frank Estergard to the RackForce management team. Frank is the company's new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and comes to us from one of the world's most respected accounting and consulting firms: KPMG. At KPMG, he was a senior account manager for 20 years and gained vast financial and business experience. Frank will manage RackForce's rapid growth and investor relations.

AirTreks, a software developer and solution provider in the global travel industry, is conducting a four to six-month evaluation of the Okanagan to determine if it is a suitable area to set up shop. The California firm is attracted to the Okanagan by the stable power supply, high-performance Internet/telecom infrastructure and business costs that are significantly lower than in San Fransisco.

AirTreks, a software developer and solution provider in the global travel industry, is conducting a four to six-month evaluation of the Okanagan to determine if it is a suitable area to set up shop. The California firm is attracted to the Okanagan by the stable power supply, high-performance Internet/telecom infrastructure and business costs that are significantly lower than in San Fransisco. "Kelowna and the Okanagan appear to have everything a growing Internet technology-related company could want," says AirTreks founder and president Jim Pilaar. "Plenty of high-speed bandwidth, a reasonable cost of doing business, and perhaps best of all, a lifestyle that is attractive to young computer engineers, with skiing, mountain biking and the lakes to play in when not coding or networking." The company is already doing business with Kelowna's RackForce.com, which now hosts some of AirTreks' servers in the Landmark Technology Center. If all goes as planned, the San Fransisco firm will launch its technology development effort in Kelowna by September.

Located in Canada's "Silicon Vineyard", Kelowna BC, RackForce offers wholesale web hosting and collocation services to ISPs, web designers and other resellers from the region's only fully redundant "Tier 1" Data Center.

Located in Canada's "Silicon Vineyard", Kelowna BC, RackForce offers wholesale web hosting and collocation services to ISPs, web designers and other resellers from the region's only fully redundant "Tier 1" Data Center. RackForce will provide clients with the services and tools they need to market and sell their product with features and prices their customers can't refuse.