LACNIC’s New Datacenter

30/05/2018

LACNIC is about to launch its new datacenter located at Casa de Internet for Latin America and the Caribbean in the city of Montevideo, noted Juan Carlos Alonso, Head of IT Operations at the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Address Registry.

LACNIC’s original datacenter was built in successive stages. Its construction began fifteen years ago, when the organization was originally established. Since then, it has undergone several transformations as the organization re-located its headquarters until finally moving to Casa de Internet.

Now, a new and larger datacenter is being built. The new datacenter has its own generator, redundant Internet links and greater wireless connectivity, and will be able to host 38 physical servers and more telecommunications equipment.

Alonso pointed out that until now the datacenter had limited physical space at Casa de Internet, so the decision was made to move the center within the same building to a facility with double the space so that it can continue to grow “in terms of services and availability.”

Most of LACNIC’s corporate services are hosted in its datacenter in Montevideo, although some of its services are hosted in a datacenter at NIC.br in São Paulo and rented space at a private datacenter in case of contingency.

Alonso noted that the datacenter located in Montevideo, which has been working on IPv6 since this protocol became available, hosts LACNIC’s corporate services for internal usage. The datacenter also has a space for research and development, where new communication technologies and software developments are studied and tested. LACNIC’S datacenter also hosts copies of two DNS root servers.

The Head of IT Operations commented that the datacenter allows LACNIC to be operationally independent and implement data management and infrastructure security policies, while keeping up with the needs of a growing organization. “We develop our own security policies to protect the data and our infrastructure,” said Alonso.

The new datacenter has incorporated state-of-the art data management and protection technology, migrating the current server infrastructure and data support. For a while, the old equipment will remain as backup and small labs will occasionally be set up to be used for training workshops.

LACNIC’s five-member IT team has been working for some time to migrate the datacenter to its new physical premises, where one of the benefits is that infrastructure will be duplicated without any service interruptions.

Operating and managing the datacenter means staying alert 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with the support of alarm systems that provide information on what is going on with the equipment and services.