The new DICE has big news for monitoring companies on both sides of the border. DICE's UL data centre in Bay City, Michigan, is ULC-compliant for Canada.
Any central station that has dealers in Canada and the United States can be hosted in the DICE centre and operate in both countries, simultaneously. Even central stations that are not using Matrix Interactive, or any other DICE product, can take advantage of ULC compliance.
UL 827A standard
DICE’S Bay City data centre is already UL Compliant. Previously, UL did not have a hosting standard in the United States. They based and built the UL 827A standard on DICE’s data centre.
As Canadian companies began hosting at the DICE data centres, they began pushing to use the UL standard that was built in the U.S. However, ULC chose to develop its own standard.
Smart home systems
Even though they based the new standard on our data centres, we had to make a lot of changes"
“Even though they based the new standard on our data centres, we had to make a lot of changes, which took about two years,” explained Cliff Dice, President, CEO, & Founder of the company.
He adds, “We spent quite a bit of time and money, but what helped is the fact that our sister company, IPtelX is a registered Canadian carrier and ISP provider. We are not only an infrastructure and security company, but also the backbone for most of the smart home systems in Canada as well.”
ULC compliant
To develop the Canadian standard, ULC looked at every detail of the DICE data centre including how the building is built, how the fire suppression systems work, redundancy, backups, failovers, power and infrastructure networks, telecom, receiver management, software management, and the disaster plans and procedures that are in place.
“We are the first and only data centre to be ULC Compliant,” said Cliff Dice, adding “Those central stations, that do not want to invest in building their own data centre, can use the DICE data centre.”