A view Kelowna, British Columbia. Photo by J. F. Bergeron via Tourism Kelowna

The area offers award-winning vineyards, tasty organic produce, a 68-mile freshwater lake and nearly 50 golf courses, all within an hour's drive. The city of Kelowna, the de facto capital of the region that boasts gourmet restaurants, world-class real estate, an international airportand a cultural district complete with museums, theater groups and a ballet.

But what most tourist brochures don't mention is that the Okanagan also is becoming known in IT spheres for something else: data processing and storage.

Thanks to its seismic stability, cheap and accessible power and a talented workforce, the Okanagan recently has seen a proliferation of data services vendors and has attracted interest from at least one major international corporation to build one of the biggest data centers in the world.

When it opens later this year, this $100 million data center—appropriately dubbed the Gigacentre—will total 85,000 square feet and will have the capacity to store nearly 35,000 terabytes of data. Put differently, the Gigacentre will generate more than 700 watts per square foot, while most data centers currently generate a maximum of 300 watts per square foot.

The Gigacentre is a joint venture between IBM and Rackforce, a local hosting service provider. It will be IBM's first data center in British Columbia and is powered by hydroelectric energy from the Columbia River. Interestingly, it's not the first North American data center to be powered by the Columbia, as the map below shows. Other data centers from Google in The Dalles, Ore., and Microsoft in Quincy, Wash., and Spokane, Wash., get their energy from the same waterway.

Safe, Yet Close to the U.S.

Brian Fry, vice president and cofounder of Rackforce, says the center, expected to open by this summer, will cement the Okanagan's position as the new data capital of the West—a position that could be particularly intriguing for U.S. companies who are looking to keep mission-critical information offsite.

"There's a lot of data out there," he says. "The Okanagan provides a safe yet close place to store it for U.S. companies to keep it under watchful eye."

Rackforce isn't the only local data storage company to meet this demand; currently, there's also a company named Iron Diamond Networks, which provides outsourced data center infrastructure services such as disaster recovery, data backup and data replication.