With a focus on Paraguay, Colombia and Bolivia as its three key markets, 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 needed to be future proof – with the capability of doubling 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 as such, it was critical to maximise the design efficiency of the facility’s footprint to ensure Tigo’s future expansion goals would be 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.

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 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 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 and Uptime Institute, ensuring that when the time came to deploy them, the new customised facilities would conform exactly to Millicom’s requirements.

Tigo Paraguay – Asuncion DC – Asuncion, Paraguay
• Tier III Certification of Design Documents
• Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility

Tigo Bogotá – Titanium Data Center – Bogota Cundianamarca, Colombia
• Tier III Certification of Design Documents
• Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility
• Tier III Gold Certification of Operational Sustainability

Data Center Tigo Business, Phase 1 – Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia
• Tier III Certification of Design Documents
• Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility

Tigo Senegal – Dakar DC, Phase-1A – Dakar, Senegal
• Tier III Certification of Design Documents
• Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility

Tigo Guatemala – Fraijanes II Data Center – Fraijanes, Guatemala
• Tier III Certification of Design Documents

Tigo Panamá IDC Clayton, Phase 1
• Tier III Certification of Design Documents
• Tier III Certification of Constructed Facility
• Tier III Gold Certification of Operational Sustainability