Thoughts from Vancouver: A Recap of CAPRE’s Data Center Summit

November 30, 2018

Recently, our CEO Todd Coleman attended the CAPRE Greater Vancouver Data Center Summit, held at the Westin Wall Centre near Vancouver Airport. Throughout the day, the room was full of key decision makers in the data center industry who shared their insights on topics such as the impact of AI and IoT on data centers, as well as the type of industry changes Canadians can expect as we progress into the new year. Overall, demand for data storage and processing continues to increase throughout Vancouver, and the rest of Canada, making it an excellent market to enter and grow in.

At eStruxture, we certainly believe this, particularly as it relates to the accelerating Media, Entertainment and Video Effects (VFX) sectors in our core markets across Canada. For us, the highlight of the event came when Todd joined Stephan Thorsteinson, the National Director of StudioCloud at Scalar Decisions, to talk about eStruxture’s partnership and how we are meeting the needs of Canada’s VFX studios now and in the future.

As a managed services provider, Scalar is a sizeable influencer in the VFX industry across Canada. With a presence in nine large Canadian cities, the company prides itself on delivering effective, practical and creative solutions to its customers. And that’s where eStruxture comes in; we work with Scalar to provide clients from this sector with the high-power densities and reliable connections they need to create the movies and shows we enjoy. In fact, we’ve been supporting Scalar since the early days of our growth in Montreal and our success influenced our decision to expand further into Hollywood North by establishing a presence in Vancouver with our VAN-1 facility.

It’s a known fact that the VFX industry is a data-intensive one, generating high storage, power and cooling requirements when studios are in a phase of full production for three or four months. However, this typically declines when studios are between projects. By working with Scalar, we provide a unique set of capacity planning tools that offer significant economic benefit to VFX studios, especially those requiring a cross-Canada presence. By being able to deploy and interchange capital efficiently between our two markets, we help our partners satisfy their peak demand needs when and where they need it. As Todd notes, “If you just focus on the VFX community, we’re talking to a new studio every week or two in Montreal, and almost all are either already in Vancouver or have plans to establish a presence there soon.”

In short, it is this kind of flexibility that makes our partnership with Scalar special. For us, a collaborative relationship is about more than selling services and supporting our bottom line; it is about growing together and building communities of interest that we can evolve with for years to come. That’s the beauty of the VFX market– it is growing as many studios seek diversification and disaster recovery capabilities.

Stephan added, “For us at Scalar, this partnership is all about complementing each others’ strengths. As one of Canada’s largest solutions providers, we have broad general resources we can deploy to solve problems for the VFX sector. However, eStruxture adds value to this by providing us with the flexibility needed to overcome challenges in a way that emphasizes our relationship over sales objectives. That’s why we’re happy to continue to grow together within Canada’s VFX sector and encourage other service providers to investigate creating similar, mutually-beneficial connections.”

If this is the kind of partnership you would be interested in, then reach out to us! We would love to get to know your needs better and discover how our customizable, hyperscale colocation, cloud, network and managed hosting services can be put to work, for both our benefits.

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