Global Crossing , a Hamilton, Bermuda-based ICT and colocation provider and network operator has completed expansion of its data center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Along with making 115 square meters (1,238 square feet) of new floor space available, additional generators were added, increasing the facility's generation capacity by 1.6 MW, said Juan Carlos Martinez, senior vice-president of Data Center Services, Security and Outsourcing for Global Crossing Latin America.

Global Crossing announced the project's completion on Monday.

Juan Carlos Martinez
senior vice-president of Data Center Services, Security, and Outsourcing
for Global Crossing Latin America.

The data center - largest of the company's four Argentina facilities - is located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Chacarita, where it was originally built in 2000. The expansion made its total floor space about 3,000 square meters (32,292 square feet).

A similar expansion project is underway at a Global Crossing data center in Chile, completion scheduled for sometime next month.

Adding new generators raised the Buenos Aires data center's total generation capacity to about 3.5 MW, Martinez said. A local utility delivers about 2 MW of power to the facility.

Global Crossing data centers provide housing, hosting, processing storage, backup, monitoring and security and managed services. The company operates 60 colocation facilities worldwide and 17 that focus on managed services, according to a company statement.

Most of the firm's facilities are located in Latin America, but it also operates one in the U.S., one in the United Kingdom and one in the Netherlands.

The firm owns an integrated global fiber-optic IP network and 15 metropolitan networks, according to a statement. All data centers connected to its network - including the one in question - are designed to adhere to similar performance standards and offer comparable products.

Until 2008, Global Crossing data centers were designed to cool between 2 KW and 2.5 KW per rack but higher densities can be cooled on newer floor space.

"Since last year we are designing all our expansions in the (Latin America) region to accommodate up to 6 KW per rack," Martinez said.

On occasion, customers - such as petroleum companies - have demanded cooling capacity of up to 22 KW per rack and the firm's facilities were able to accommodate some of them.

Expansion of the Buenos Aires and the Chile facilities are part of Global Crossing's continued expansion, spurred by growing demand for data center services in the region.

"It's a significant expansion for us in Argentina," Martinez said. "In this particular time, in which many companies are deferring investment, we are investing in Argentina and Chile and many other countries in the region."

In 2002, Global Crossing went bankrupt in what has been considered one of the largest bankruptcy cases in U.S. history, according to an Associated Press report. As a result of the bankruptcy filing, investors lost $54 billion.

The company filed for bankruptcy in both Bermuda and New York, according to news reports. It was reorganized and re-emerged with a new set of executives and a new board of directors in 2003.