Google, Facebook and Netflix will house their data in Latin America’s most modern data center, which has four rooms with 1,000 racks prepared to carry 40,000 servers.

The enormous building located in the city of Pando, has 12,500 square meters and is Uruguay’s biggest and one of the region’s most important data centers.

The new building complies with international standards on security and technology, which will allow ANTEL – Uruguay’s government-owned telecommunications company- to sell data storage to public and private companies, locally and internationally.

Until now Uruguay’s big data center was also owned by ANTEL and located in Montevideo’s Pocitos neighborhood, but had a limited storage capacity of only 150 racks.

There are 33 data centers in the World like the one built by ANTEL and only four are in South America. Antel made a 50 million dollars investment for the center building and start up.

The cloud in Uruguay

The center works with security standards that are unusual to the local market. There are three security levels that allow access to clients and employees. More than 200 cameras guard every inch of the center, equipped with bulletproof glasses, fingerprint biometric detectors and armored doors. Measures that aim to secure one of the most valuable assets of modern economy: data, the visible or invisible core of every company, institution or organization.

With this endeavor, ANTEL ended a path started more than a year ago when it announced the building of submarine cables in partnership with Google and other companies, which will bring direct connection with one of the Internet central nodes located in the USA. With a stronger connection and a data center capable of store millions of data, the state owned company aspires to sell their services to clients all around the world. For instance international companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix and Akamai already hired servers in the new data center to provide services to Uruguayans clients.

The pros of being local

While a big finance company might need 800 servers for its business, some other clients need less. Offers start from 20 servers onward.

Besides, each client can choose the hardware type and power. With that in mind, the state owned company designed different room temperatures, depending on hired servers power.

The ideal temperature for the servers is 21-Celsius degrees. Achieving this temperature is a complex and expensive task. A special air conditioning system pull out the heat made by the servers and renews the air to achieve the ideal temperature. 40 servers consume the same energy as three family houses.

The connection is far more direct with a local data center because the latency that occurs when data is stored in foreign data centers is avoided. To put things in an everyday context: a high definition video will stream without interruption and with better quality if the video is stored in a local data center.

ANTEL president Andrés Tolosa said in the opening ceremony, that the data center is “a future investment to be a technological port for the Internet revolution. The new data center brings cloud services for companies, people and homes”.

“Now the companies are using less data storage in their places, hiring data center services to store their data in the cloud. We will be able to sell our services to companies in Argentina and Brazil and compete with other South American data center facilities” he added.

“World class hard drive”

The happy face of Carolina Cosse, Uruguay’s industry minister and former ANTEL president said it all. It was the icing on the cake to a project she leaded when she was ANTEL’s chairman.

In her speech she said “once more we are putting Uruguay in the forefront of technology information services. It is a great achievement but overall is a big push to data and telecommunications services”.

For Cosse the data center will be “Uruguay’s World Class hard drive”.

“We have the best security technology and a solid legal framework, to sell our services outside”– she added.
Also she said that the new data center will convey better Internet broadband for everyone in Uruguay. “We now have the cloud in Uruguay and this will be a great tool for students (…) but also for local microbusiness, at a very low price”.

Source: El Observador