OVH starts work on Canadian data centre

French internet host OVH has begun work on its first data centre in North America in Beauharnois, Canada, around 50 km from Montreal, Les Echos reports. The CAD 100 million facility will be able to host 80,000 servers within three years. It will be of the same type as the Roubaix 4 data centre opened last June at the company's headquarters in Roubaix, northern France. The Canadian subsidiary expects to create 127 jobs within three years at Bauharnois, a main office in Montreal and an office to be set up in Boston, Massachussets. OVH aims to initially serve French companies in North America, then to create its own market with prices two or three times lower than its American rivals, said Octave Klaba, who co-founded OVH with his father in 1999 and moved to Montreal last October. After opening its data centre in eastern Canada it hopes to open another in the West of the continent, in Vancouver or Seattle, and a third in the Midwest of the US. The company will need to have a data centre every 2,000 km to offer good quality of service to its clients, he added. OVH currently operates twelve subsidiaries in Europe and three in North Africa.