Banco Santander announced in June the opening of their Brazil data center, the Spanish banking group’s first in the country.
The new facility cost almost $500 million to construct and is located approximately 60 miles from Sao Paulo. It is the first Latin American data center to be certified by the Uptime Institute for Tier-IV service and is one of only 12 such facilities in the world.
“Brazil is a very competitive market and we need to have the latest technology to keep pace with our competitors,” said Santander Brazil president Jesus Zabalza.
The Brazil data center took three years to build and will greatly improve monitoring systems as well as provide additional space for server expansion. The 8,600 square foot facility has a power station capable of generating 50,000 kilowatts, enough electricity to power a city of 200,000 people.
The facility has virtualized storage capacity of more than 5 petabytes and an average of 210 million transactions daily. The building will contain 9,000 virtualized servers, ensuring efficient equipment use while keep power consumption low.
The new Brazil data center will operate in tandem with Banco Santander’s Spain data center, U.K. data center and Mexico data center. The facility’s infrastructure will support cloud platforms and offer greater agility while reducing costs.
“This data center complies with the most demanding international standards and reflects the enormous confidence and potential that Santander has in Brazil,” said Zabalza.
Banco Santander is the third largest private bank in Brazil, and the financial group intends to move all of its data to the new Brazil data center. The bank has major operations in Latin America, and operates a similarly large Mexico data center. Since Banco Santander first started operations in Brazil in 1982, the banking group has invested more than $30 billion in infrastructure and technology in the country and surrounding markets.
