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EdgeConneX Takes Its Flavor of Edge Data Center to South America
The company announced a 10MW facility in Buenos Aires with support from the government and a group of telco partners that serve the region. Cloud providers are increasingly targeting South America for data center expansion.
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A look down an aisle at an EdgeConneX data centerEdgeConneX
EdgeConneX, the Herndon, Virginia-based data center provider specializing in large edge data center facilities for local content and cloud data caching and interconnection for last-mile ISPs, is expanding into South America.
The company announced this week a plan to build a data center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in partnership with the country’s economic development agency and a group of telecommunications companies operating in the region. EdgeConneX expects to launch the 10MW facility in late 2018, a company spokesperson told DCK in an email.
The type of edge data centers EdgeConneX builds is different from the type of computing infrastructure the term “edge” is most frequently applied to today. The latter is a relatively small pod of IT gear deployed at a factory floor, in a retail store, an oil rig, or a locomotive for local processing of the data that’s generated at the site. An EdgeConneX facility is where content and cloud providers cache data so it can be delivered quickly to end users located in the same region. Local ISPs access this data in these facilities and deliver it to their customers.
By storing frequently accessed data locally instead of constantly carrying it over long-haul networks from remote locations, the content and cloud companies reduce their long-haul bandwidth costs.
As more and more companies start using cloud services, and as people consume more digital content over the internet, demand for edge facilities of this type is rising in more and more areas around the world, creating an opportunity for a provider like EdgeConneX.
In a statement, EdgeConneX said:
In collaboration with its customers, EdgeConneX has recognized the need for edge services across the globe as cloud applications require localization and availability in the most proximate location to enterprise and consumer end-users.
In addition to edge data centers, EdgeConneX has built several massive server farms for Microsoft’s hyper-scale cloud platform in the US and Europe.
Cloud Giants Eye South America
The world’s largest cloud providers are increasingly targeting South America for data center construction to be better positioned to take advantage of growing market opportunities there.
Amazon Web Services is currently in the process of choosing between Buenos Aires and a location in Chile for its next cloud data center in the region, according to a recent news report. It already has data centers in São Paulo, Brazil.
Google launched its São Paulo cloud region in September 2017, and a Microsoft Azure region there came online in 2014. (A Google data center outside of Santiago, Chile, has been online since 2015, but at least for now it doesn’t host an availability region for the company’s enterprise cloud services.)
In addition to Buenos Aires, EdgeConneX is also considering building an edge data center in Santiago, Chile, according to its website.
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