KIO Networks has commenced operations at its new US$20m, 2,500 sq ft data center in Guatemala – its second data center in the country based at its 27,000 sq m technology campus at El Naranjo.

KIO said the facility will help brings its services closer to Guatemalan customers, including hosting, colocation, application management, SAP on-demand for financial transactions and securities markets, private and public cloud services.

The data center will also be used for business continuity and national security, big data solutions, document scanning services and information management processes.

KIO said the data center project has provided about 60 short-term jobs and will create about 200 in the long term, adding to the company 1,600-strong headcount across Latin America, where it has 13 other data centers which it said have been designed to a Tier IV standard.

These are located in Mexico, Querataro, Panama and Guatemala.

President of the Republic of Guatemala general Otto Pérez Molina attended the opening of the facility, with other members of the cabinet and ministers of state.

KIO said it builds all its data centers to offer more than 10kW per rack, and aims for a power usage effectiveness across its portfolio of 1.4.

Its data centers incorporate ultra-low-latency network topologies and use free-air cooling and cold-aisle containment.