Telefonica Opens Facility for Open Cloud
Access to the latest digital technology varies greatly from region to region around the globe. This is based on a range of different factors, including the available infrastructure and demand from the local population. However, as the world becomes more connected, every region needs to have these technologies in place. The new data center Telefonica just inaugurated in Chile is one of the most advanced facilities in South America, and key amongst its many offerings will be cloud services.
Telefónica is a broadband and telecommunications provider with operations in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The company currently has more than 322 million customers in 21 countries, with seven of those countries based in South America.
The data center in Chile will deliver the same services as any top tier facility in another country. According to the company, this will include colocation, hosting, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and managed services.
Although Telefonica has two additional sites in Chile, this new center will be the only one offering Open Cloud service based on OpenStack. In choosing an open-source cloud software platform, the company will have an easier time for its customers in the country to start deploying cloud based services.
With OpenStack, customers can manage their virtual instances with greater ease using the platform's web-based interface. OpenStack eliminates the need to go beneath the virtualization layer in order to launch virtual machines, thus making it much easier in countries where the technology is in the early stages of adoption.
Service providers will be able to monitor and manage their cloud services within a dashboard that is a web app for managing, compute, storage and networking resources. Administrators get a clear over view of active VM instances, users, resource usage and more.
As the number of cloud services grows in Chile, businesses will be able to use the technology to improve their operations across the board, including manufacturing, customer service and more.
The data center is a 5,000 sq m (53,819 sq. ft.) facility with 1,000 sq m (10,763 sq ft) dedicated to house client equipment and Telefonica Movistar Cloud services. It is a Tier III facility certified for redundancy with 24-hour guard patrols. And since Chile is prone to earthquakes, it has seismic protection for tremors that measure up to 9 on the Richter scale.
The investment in Chile is based on the growth of this region. During the Q1 2016 report, the company revealed the Latin American market had maintained double digit growth rates of more than 11.3 percent, while Spain, where the company is based, only saw a 2.1 percent increase.
If the growth of the cloud market comes anywhere close to the rest of Telefonica's services, the data center in Chile will be a great investment.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
