eStruxture Data Centers
A Canadian Paragon of Efficiency, Reliability, and Innovation

The ubiquity of the internet and its associated applications are fuelling a paradigm shift in the data center landscape. Today, there are approximately 100 million servers worldwide that support the internet, with each server consuming between 7 and 25 kWh of power every day. At 12 cents per kWh in the U.S., running servers alone costs a lot of money. Understandably, for many companies, price is a crucial factor in choosing a data center. But this focus on the price cannot happen at the expense of quality.

The super-nimble company, eStruxture Data Centers, which just celebrated its 5-year anniversary in February 2022, perfectly understands this equation.

Founded by Todd Coleman in 2017, eStruxture Data Centers has changed the game in the market with its competitively priced (and positioned) data centers. With 15 data centers located all across Canada, eStruxture is the country’s largest carrier-neutral, privately-held data center company, providing businesses with the capacity, performance, and flexibility required to run modern and demanding enterprise applications on their own or in colocation. Being on Canadian soil enables the company to tap into the low cost, green hydroelectricity, and a broad choice of high-speed optical fiber ISPs to provide robust solutions for customers. In addition, Canada’s proximity to the U.S., even in geopolitical terms, makes it an ideal hub for data center placement.

“We’re experts in the Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary markets,” says Coleman, the President and CEO. “We know exactly who we are and, unlike our competitors who dilute their focus by chasing a lot of different things, we are laser focused on a few things that we do extremely well.

This ensures that our customers always receive the highest quality of service.” eStruxture’s customers—who cover a broad spectrum of industries from cloud providers to media content, and artificial intelligence —appreciate the flexibility, level of customization, competitive and transparent pricing, and resourcefulness they provide. For instance, one of eStruxture’s customers referred the company to a Canadian Government agency looking to set up a disaster recovery site in a Tier III data center facility. eStruxture had the perfect infrastructure located at an ideal distance from the customer’s main site. The customer truly appreciated the flexibility and the dedicated resources that eStruxture provided to help with their implementation.

Addressing the Needs of the Data Center Market

As a unique data center operator based in Canada, eStruxture works with a wide range of customers with varied requirements. Especially in the past 24 months, the COVID pandemic and consequent shift towards remote working/learning/living have prompted the demand for cloud- and server-hosting data centers to skyrocket.

eStruxture understands that the skyrocketing demand cannot be addressed with a one-size-fits-all approach. On the one hand, hyperscale customers and big enterprises require data centers with better hardware, bandwidth, and capacity to handle massive traffic. On the other hand, typical cloud adopters either seek to leverage the elastic pricing and capacity that hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba, and Amazon can provide or work directly with data center providers to house their workloads that would grow with time. While smaller, “retail” users need server units between 5-10 kWh, larger wholesale customers are looking for 500 kWh super servers with 10-20 or even 100 times the appetite of the servers for the retail market.

eStruxture has formulated a recipe that would help them deliver solutions that meet the specifications of both parties at a competitive cost. The company has taken a radical approach from day one regarding the amount of power and space consumed within its data centers. Typically, in the data center operator vernacular, the amount of energy is quantified on a per cabinet basis. For example, a data center five years ago would have contained a 3-5 kW per cabinet or rack equivalent. Since then, with more cloud applications, most data center operators are building out approximately 10-12 kW per cabinet. eStruxture’s server setup has been designed to accommodate increasing rack capacity. All of its data centers can handle up to 30 kW per rack equivalent without needing any mechanical engineering overhaul. The setup reduces economic impact, both for the customer and the provider. Further, sustainability is extremely important to the company. All of eStruxture’s data centers are designed from the ground up to reduce energy and water wastage.

“We Have Built a Scalable Data Center Company That Even the Largest Global Players Can’t Compete With”

All these benefits, combined with the low cost of power, make it easier for eStruxture to run higher density applications within its data centers while providing better cost-benefit for the customer. Furthermore, thanks to eStruxture’s strategic relationships with suppliers and the ability to have equipment pre ordered and immediately available, customer space can be deployed without wasting a moment.

All of eStruxture’s facilities are hyper secure, and the company covers all aspects, including the zoning and the monitoring of the premises via multi-level authentication. eStruxture employs pass cards, fingerprints, physical I.D.s, retina scans, and video monitoring to observe all people/things moving in and out of the data center. The facilities are also highly secure in terms of their resilience. Coleman states, “We enable our customers to grow in their existing facility while providing geographically diverse disaster recovery benefits in terms of failover in the other various locations that we operate.”

In addition to their data center solutions, eStruxture also adds value as a trusted advisor. The company educates customers on the geographies in Canada and the data center locations from which they can avail the services. This is particularly useful in cases where colocation customers are unfamiliar with the market. eStruxture also introduces customers to telecommunications network providers, giving them the optionality of partners and vendors within the data center ecosystem.

Moreover, eStruxture addresses customers’ requirements pertaining to data sovereignty rules regarding the storage of certain data types. In fact, due to the geopolitical instability around the U.S. over the last five years, many global businesses have been looking to move their data and applications closer to the U.S. without being inside the borders. This presents an additional opportunity that eStruxture is ready to solve.

Eyeing Undisputed Presence in the Canadian Data Center Market

With its broad range of services, eStruxture plans to go deeper into the data center market. The company recently purchased a major Canadian data center platform, bringing eight additional data centers to boost the available capacity for customers. They are also building a brand new, state-of-the art data center in Calgary, a 20 plus megawatt facility with a $100 Mn investment. The data center is due to open by the end of this year and will be the largest in the area.

We Developed the Largest Canadian Data Center Platform in Under Five Years But Still Think of Ourselves as a Super Nimble Entrepreneurial Start-Up. And that’s the Mentality and the Culture that Fuelled Our Incredible Growth

eStruxture will continue to deploy new capital for both greenfield and brownfield growth while being opportunistic on the acquisition front. The company has made several consolidations over the last five years, and it will continue to do so in the months to come. “We have built a scalable company that even the largest global players can’t compete with,” says Coleman.

All of eStruxture’s expertise and service are backed by a dedicated team of professionals. Each employee understands the importance of their customers and works diligently to operate with urgency and attention to detail. They are also aware of their responsibility to meet customer expectations regarding their position as trusted advisors in the Canadian data center market. The team is led by a strong entrepreneurial start up mentality cultivated by Coleman. As eStruxture’s CEO, Coleman continues to be a very hands-on leader who will often roll up his sleeves to solve problems himself, a common trait across the leadership team, mid-level managers, and frontline staff. That is the eStruxture identity, which they will continue to nurture for the years to come.