The data center can run without air conditioning using its own proprietary cooling technologies and sources its power from a  nearby hydro-electric dam, the company said. The facility claims it can attain a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of less than 1.1. PUE, a metric created by the Green Grid, is a ratio of how much of a data center’s energy consumption is used to run its IT and servers compared to overall power consumption at the facility. The more energy that gets sucked up for cooling and power conversion, the higher the PUE and the lower its efficiency. While a commonly used metric, PUE does not tell the whole story, as GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher has explained.

OVH.com, based in Roubaix, France, offers dedicated cloud capabilities for business customers that do not want to deploy on shared resources. The BHS facility, located in Montreal’s Beauharnois neighborhood, is OVH.com’s 11th data center worldwide and runs 360,000 custom physical servers.

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