Dataville

Dataville is a system of data centers bridging New York City and London from Atlantic Canada without the associated risks or high costs of either location.

A repurposed, hardened Canada DND (Department Of National Defense) Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) base in Nova Scotia (former CFB Debert), Bastionhost Ltd. began acquiring the military base, planning and creating Dataville in 2006. Bastionhost's founder A. E. Self originally conceived the idea in 1999 -- but then concluded the idea of serving New York and London from a single location was years ahead of its time.

The tragic events of 911 forever changed the world. Data center operators, IT executives, and insurance company risk managers began to rethink their business continuity plans and strategies, pushing the alternate data center site farther away from The Primary site. This opened new frontiers for data center site selection criteria. The marketplace's willingness to locate mission-critical network servers to a single alternate site was accelerated. Dataville -- situated on the Great Circle Route between the world's two largest financial capitals -- became the first single large-scale remote location to host applications for primary sites in both North America and Europe.

The most significant driver for Dataville was not 911, but the passage in October 2001 by the United States Congress of the US Patriot Act. As the dust settled on 911, European companies digested this new legislation and its privacy law ramifications. They began uprooting servers from US data centers.

The Patriot Act contravenes many European Union privacy laws, making it illegal to host confidential information AbOUT European nationals in the United States. Certain European servers meant to support North American offices were relocated to data centers in the EU causing a new problem for remote hosting applications to the United States. The round-trip distance across trans-Atlantic fiberoptic cables was too great -- even at the speed of light -- causing intolerable latency for many time-sensitive applications.

With 54 miliseconds round-trip ping times to London, 11 miliseconds to New York, and 7 miliseconds to Boston, Dataville offers European -compliant privacy laws, while avoiding most of the intolerable delays caused by hosting US -driven applications in far away European data centers.

Serving both North America and Europe from a single location provides an economic benefit to Dataville's occupants. The central location eliminates much doubling of considerable capital expenditures for maintaining two alternate data center sites outside both New York and London -- and other cities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.