Apresentação de clientes: Tier III Data Centres Delivered by Flexenclosure to Millicom in Paraguay, Colombia, and now Bolivia

"We strongly believe that our strategy of investment and our strong business partnerships with Flexenclosure and Uptime Institute, address our increasingly demanding internal needs and assists us in becoming the premier provider of B2B solutions in all the markets in which we operate."

Xavier Rocoplan
EVP, Chief Technical & Information Officer
Millicom

Visão geral

A Millicom é uma provedora líder de serviços móveis e a cabo, dedicada a mercados emergentes na América Latina e na África. Por meio da marca comercial Tigo, a empresa fornece estilos de vida digitais a aproximadamente 51 milhões de clientes.

Millicom has a strong, established position in the Latin American mobile markets, and wanted to expand its portfolio via new consumer cable and fixed broadband offerings, along with enhanced B2B services like physical and virtual data hosting. With the enterprise services markets still in their infancy in emerging markets, there was a clear opportunity to take first mover advantage and secure significant market share.

To be able to do this Millicom needed new and sophisticated data centre facilities capable of delivering the hosting, cloud, disaster recovery and other business services that customers were increasingly demanding.

Opportunity

With a focus on the three key markets of Paraguay, Colombia and Bolivia, Millicom set the bar extremely high from the outset, demonstrating the company’s commitment to bringing the latest technology to its Tigo businesses and their corporate clients.

In order to provide both the breadth of services and peace of mind customers required, the data centres needed to be world class – designed and purpose-built to Uptime Institute Tier III standards. They also need to be future proof – with the capability of doubling the facilities in size as business expands, without any interruption to ongoing operations.

The Uptime Institute Tier Certification of Constructed Facility provides a process that ensures deficiencies in the design are identified, solved, and tested before an organization commences operations. The consequences of a data centre failure can be significant, including site impact, business cost, and market perception, and the Tier Certification of Constructed Facility allows companies to rest assured, knowing there are no unforeseen risks, shortfalls, or weak links in the infrastructure.

Each of the locations identified for the new facilities had their own unique challenges:

The site in the Paraguayan capital Asunción was limited in size, and it as such was critical to maximise the design efficiency of the facility’s footprint to ensure Tigo’s future expansion goals were possible. The urban location also created significant access issues for the large prefabricated data centre modules.
In Bogota, Colombia, the lower air density of the site’s high altitude placed special demands on the design of the cooling and power equipment, with the systems needing to be de-rated accordingly.
Simply getting the modules to the Santa Cruz de la Sierra site was a challenge, as the modules needed to be shipped to Chile and driven in convoy across the Andes mountains to land-locked Bolivia.

“Thanks to Uptime Institute and Tier Certification, Flexenclosure has delivered world-class data centres that provide us with the high security protocols, latest technology and day-to-day operational efficiencies we need.”

Xavier_Rocoplan
EVP, Chief Technical & Information Officer
Millicom

Solution

Flexenclosure’s prefabricated eCentre data centre was selected as the ideal solution for Millicom. The first facility to be completed, for Tigo Business in Paraguay, was the first professional colocation facility in the country and the first Uptime Institute Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility for a prefabricated data centre built anywhere in Latin America. The Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility ensures that a facility is built to its intended performance capacity, effectiveness, and reliability. Additionally, the Paraguay facility also received the 2016 Datacenter Dynamics “Best Modular Implementation” Award in Latin America.

The second data centre built by Flexenclosure was the Titanium facility for TigoUne in Colombia. The Colombia data centre is also Uptime Institute Tier III certified and was a finalist for the 2018 Datacenter Dynamics LATAM awards. At 770sqm the facility is twice the size of the Paraguay data centre and is used to integrate services such as cloud servers, applications, storage, backup and recovery, colocation, virtual desks, cybersecurity, IoT, big data and analytics and cloud environments – both private and public or hybrid.

Bolivia’s breath-taking new Uptime Institute Tier III Certification of Design Documents awarded facility is the first dedicated professional colocation data centre of its kind in the country. It also has an integrated building management system, allowing the entire facility to be remotely monitored.

All three facilities are of a hybrid construction design, including traditional brick and mortar office buildings and prefabricated modular eCentre data centres, seamlessly wrapped in aluminium and glass façades. The result is three world-class data centres that have provided Millicom with the critical infrastructure required to position Tigo as the service provider of choice in their business communications markets.

From the very beginning, a close and collaborative working relationship was established between Millicom, Flexenclosure and Uptime Institute, ensuring that when the time came to deploy them, the new customised facilities would conform exactly to Millicom’s requirements.

Xavier Rocoplan, EVP, Chief Technology & Information Officer at Millicom, talks about their new eCentre™ data centres for Tigo in Paraguay, Colombia and Bolivia.