Thanks for all your advice.

I've been looking into starting my own datacenter for a while. But I'm starting to get all my perliminary information before I go ahead with anything (eg. determining cost, competition, potential locations, equipment required. ect.).

In Winnipeg we don't have alot of datacenters. 2 or 3 small ones operated by Canadian ISPs and as I said earlier they are expensive ($200/month + $25/GB for 1u). I would say that if I could offer an alternative at a cheaper price I would be able to compete with them.

I'm not sure though how to go about determining the demand for a datacenter in Winnipeg. But I would say there exists a demand as we don't have any reasonable priced datacenters that are even remotly close and people are forced to either colocate in the US or rent dedicated servers from US providers. I've seen some try to host their sites from their cable or DSL lines (bussiness line or not).

Also where would be a good place to look for used Liebert or MCE systems. Althought I like the APC system for its scalability it might be cheaper (and probably wiser) to go with a system made up of other brand equipment that I could get used.