TORONTO — Digital Realty expanded its One Century Place facility, a major regional connectivity hub in greater Toronto, bringing online additional colocation capacity to meet the area's growing networking needs. As more technology and data-centric businesses move or scale in the region, facilities like One Century Place are key to providing customers the flexibility and performance needed to realize their digital ambitions.

The facility was previously home to the iconic Toronto Star printing facility, and Digital Realty is expanding its Canadian colocation capabilities to spur new digital transformation initiatives. The new capacity will help address the needs of today's enterprise customers that require more distributed data hosting, connectivity, and exascale computing in a single campus, along with the flexibility to easily scale capacity and network bandwidth requirements.

"Toronto is a more critical market than ever as businesses recognize the growing importance of the region as one of the next major technology hubs in North America," said Digital Realty Chief Executive Officer A. William Stein. "Today's announcement marks a significant milestone in the expansion of PlatformDIGITAL™, as we continue to expand our colocation capabilities in strategic regions around the world. We are enabling our customers to address the challenges of data gravity by deploying their digital infrastructure in close proximity to key cloud deployments and providing the coverage, capacity, and connectivity requirements to support their current and future goals." 

The expansion of One Century Place in Vaughn, also known as TOR1, is expected to add 6,000 square feet and 1,500 kilowatts of colocation capacity to a broad cross-section of customers across industries. In addition to providing customers room to grow, the facility also boasts connections to key partners, networks, and service and cloud providers that form the connected communities of digital transformation.

To support customers in TOR1, Digital Realty will leverage IBM's next-generation Direct Link 2.0 capabilities, providing direct access to the IBM Cloud in Toronto. Direct Link 2.0 enables customers to spend less time designing and deploying network architectures to accelerate the development of new solutions via the hybrid cloud. This includes giving customers broader access to IBM services, including blockchain, AI, data analytics, and quantum computing.

"Data-rich technologies, like AI and IoT, are being deployed at a rapid scale, requiring enterprises to locate their infrastructure closer to highly connected centers of data exchange,” Stein said. “Enterprises now need greater access to productized colocation offerings at the heart of where digital business is happening. We see significant growth potential in greater Toronto as digital business accelerates.”