CenturyLink is opening its second new data center in the Toronto area - dubbed TR3 - in the Markham district of the town.

The new facility is Centurylink’s 55th in the world and its fourth in Canada.

TR3 will offer managed services to businesses on virtual, dedicated and colocation platforms.

The new site has received Uptime Institute’s Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility and Tier III Certification of Design Documents.

TR3 is built to support 5 MW of IT load, 100,000 sq ft of raised floor.

Its opening means that CenturyLink’s Toronto data center footprint now totals 11 MW of IT load and approximately 185,000 sq ft of raised floor space.

The Toronto region now ranks among the top financial centers and technology hubs in the world, according to statistics collected and shared by the Toronto Financial Services Alliance.

One of its first flagship clients will be RMS, a catastrophe risk management firm, which hosts its infrastructure in several CenturyLink data centers, including Toronto.

RMS’s SVP of cloud platform operations Paris Georgallis said: “CenturyLink gives RMS an integrated colocation and cloud system to meet the security, compliance and agility requirements of our new risk management platform.”

“Our clients can use it without worrying about the underlying IT infrastructure it’s now highly robust,” Paris said.

According to IDC analyst Mark Schrutt CenturyLink’s Toronto data centers have boosted local businesses and attracted more inward investment to the region.

Schrutt said there is a growing base of international clients that require in-Canada hosting.

“CenturyLink’s hosting solutions are enterprise grade, secure and delivered from a portfolio of solid, multiuse and globally diversified data centers,” Schrutt said.

“They provide clients with the flexibility of distributing workloads between traditional hosting and public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments.”

CenturyLink’s country manager Ash Mathur said businesses that operate in Canada decide to partner with CenturyLink because it helps them succeed.

“The key to this is understanding them and addressing their specific technology needs - and ensuring the continuity of mission-critical business applications,” Mathur said.