A VIP tour of Curaçao Technology Exchange N.V. (CTEX)

Worldwide, there are only 11 Tier IV certified datacenters. CTEX on Curaçao is one of them, thanks to the vision and perseverance of one man, and some crucial qualities of the location.

Text Heather De Paulo

The idea for a data center on Curaçao started 13 years ago in the year 2000. That same year, Telefonica, the second largest telecom company in the world, had made a 32 billion dollar investment in Latin America, building five major data centers in Miami, San Paulo, Buenos Aires, Peru and Chile. Even with this huge expansion, it was discovered that there was a large geographical segment not covered by these high-end data centers: Panama, Columbia, Suriname, parts of Venezuela and the Caribbean.

Vision
Anthony de Lima, who was the executive vice president of Telefonica at the time, created the first vision of Curaçao Technology Exchange N.V. (CTEX), along with partners, and presented it to Telefonica. The idea was rejected because most of the company’s business was focused in Brazil. The idea did not get completely put to rest as, 10 years later, de Lima and the ex-CEO of Telefonica, Juan Villalonga, came together and started to really look at how realistic it was to make CTEX a reality. Market research showed that companies in this region that needed a high end data center had to source out as far as the US, Canada and even Germany. With this information, it was decided to move forward with the project and launch CTEX.

Highest level
When Anthony de Lima, President and CEO of CTEX, does something, he goes all the way, settling for nothing but the best. Therefore, it is no surprise that CTEX was designed to be certified as a Tier IV data center, the highest level certification for a data center, by Uptime Institute, a global data center certification company. It isn’t unusual for a company to get the Tier IV certification on the design, but never build the facility to meet the design. Right now in the Caribbean and Latin American region, there are four Tier IV design certified multi- tenant data centers: Telconet in Equador, KIO Networks in Mexico, Instituto Nacional de Seguros in Costa Rica and CTEX on Curaçao. Of these four, CTEX will be the first to be ‘facility certified’, which will make it one out of 11 data centers at this level worldwide.

Critical
Certification as a Tier IV data center guarantees that CTEX is a fault tolerant facility with the ability to guarantee 100% uptime. This means that a single failure of any capacity system, capacity component or distribution element will not impact the computer equipment, and that the system itself automatically responds, or ‘self-heals’, to a failure to prevent further impact to the site. This is critical because no outage to computer equipment will happen, even in unplanned events such as equipment failures, fire, explosion, etc. Certification as a Tier IV data center is a big deal for customers looking for a data center to store their valuable information, because it indicates the level of quality the data center can provide and the service level agreements that can be offered to the customer.

How can CTEX guarantee to uphold these stringent standards and guarantee 100% availability to its customers, 24 hours a day, year-round? Even though Curaçao is situated outside the traditional hurricane belt and away from major seismic fault lines, the facility is designed to withstand level-three earthquakes and exceeds level-five hurricane safety standards.

The facility is also directly interconnected with five major international subsea fiber cables, with three more coming in to the north side of the island in 2014. Ninety percent of the digital traffic that travels around the world goes through submarine fiber cables that lie on the ocean bed, come up on shore and connect to a landing station. This makes communications to and from CTEX much more efficient than using a satellite link, which could never provide the same performance as fiber cables.

Power
The facility’s entire power and cooling infrastructure was designed from the ground up in partnership with Schneider Electric. On a regular basis, power is supplied to the facility from Aqualectra. However, in case of emergency, CTEX has a commercial grade generator plant at the back of the facility that is designed to run 24-7. Mr. de Lima explains, “If we see any instability in the grid, we take the facility off line and run from our own power generation plant. There are diesel bins that hold 320,000 gallons of fuel. That means the facility can run for 14 days flat without refueling.” CTEX is also working with a company that will build an 11-megawatt solar park right next to this. Each building consumes 5 megawatts, so the goal is that during the day, a whole building can run on solar power.

Four segments of customers
CTEX will have customers worldwide from a vast range of industries. To simplify things, the customer base of CTEX is broken down into categories, from geographical location to type of industry. Geographically, CTEX has four segments of customers. The first is the North American Fortune 500 companies with offshore operations who conduct business in Latin America and are looking for high-end data centers in the region. The second segment is the largest and fastest growing segment, the multi-Latinas. These are the largest corporations in Columbia, Venezuela, Panama and Brazil that set up operations internationally. They move, act and behave just as their American Fortune 500 counterparts did 10-15 years ago. The third segment is European customers that have investments in Latin America and need a place to house their applications and software. Finally, the fourth segment is the Caribbean customers that are located in areas that are not as safe as Curaçao, such as those islands located in the hurricane belt or seismic zone.

Within those four geographic segments, clients are categorized by five primary industry verticals: financial services, manufacturing, health care and life sciences, transportation and logistics and oil and gas, which is the fastest moving segment. Within these industry verticals are the types of customers: the multi-nationals and the small to medium enterprise customer. For each type of customer, there is a different type of solution. The large Fortune 500 companies typically want a very secure, high-end facility where they can place their servers, applications and data, with the confidence that there are high levels of security and protection and that their servers are up and running 24-7. They bring in their own equipment, put it into secure racks located at the CTEX facility and use the data center services. These services include: managing security of the infrastructure 24-7, co-location, network management and managed services. With managed services, CTEX can be the remote hands for remote customers, performing updates, etc., by permission and by contract only.

Partner
For the small to medium business owner, an investment in their own servers may not be worthwhile; they just want their applications and data up and running when they want it. For these customers, CTEX has partnered with a company called the Virtual Computing Environment Company, or VCE. VCE is an American computer integration company and is a joint venture between Cisco Systems, EMC Corporation, VMware and Intel Corporation; jointly they invested around $480 million to create this cloud platform. There have been live customers using this service since October 2012, several of those companies with less than five employees. Customers are billed on a monthly basis for the amount of computing capacity they use, like a consumption fee, just in the same way you would pay for electricity. For many years now, companies have used tape back-ups where, on a daily basis, someone has to change the tapes. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t, but with current technology, the tape business is nearly dead. CTEX has a system called ‘back-up as a service’. At the end of the day, software at CTEX wakes up, compares what’s in its storage grid as compared to what’s on your server, and whatever is different from the last back-up gets shipped over. This creates a realtime back-up at all times in the ‘cloud’.

Our biggest challenge right now is work discipline; our work discipline has to change dramatically.

Cloud
What is the difference between storing your data in a cloud at CTEX and storing it in a public cloud, like Apple’s iCloud? Anthony de Lima explains, “In a public cloud model, like in the case of Apple’s iCloud, it’s a consumer-based cloud environment and you share an infrastructure and server with other users. You put everything up there — photos, music, etc. You use the resources, but you have no idea and don’t really care where your data gets stored. It could be in Singapore, North Carolina, Texas or Holland — you have no control of your data. In the case of a private or hybrid cloud model, when you put your information on a server, that server is yours. That storage is for you, the customer; you don’t share with anyone else. CTEX guarantees to the customer that they know at all points in time where their data sits.” There is a whole portfolio of services that deals with advanced cloud services, from backup to storage and data center solutions. Details on the cloud solutions can be found at www.ctexhypercloud.com.

Market research showed that companies in this region that needed a high end data center had to source out as far as the US, Canada and even Germany.

In the private cloud environment, some may believe that you have to be sensitive about security, but the reverse is actually the case. When all of your applications and data are stored on a secured server in a high end data center, your data is much more secure than if your server sits in your office. In the data center, no one can monitor your ADSL connections. If a memory stick goes into a computer to access data, the data center is alerted right away — the data center monitors everything that touches anything in its environment. CTEX provides data leakage protection for its customers.

Business apps
CTEX offers applications specific to a selected industry that are more business related, rather than consumer related, i.e. something you would buy from the App Store. Along the industry verticals, different sectors can set up business apps that are focused for each respective industry. These apps are set up in a private cloud for each sector that CTEX administers. An example of this is Bearing Point, a client of CTEX. It has set up business apps that are focused around the government sector where those who access it can use a tax collection system. An app like this would be useful for someone in the tax industry who can use the information to help run his or her core business. CTEX is also working with several accounting software vendors so that their accounting package resides on a CTEX server in the cloud. This enables users to instantly access the information to more efficiently assist customers.

Nexus
With the options CTEX is bundling together, it allows businesses to come to the data center and host their services; the transactions will happen in the data center. Mr. de Lima states, “The whole vision behind this company is to create a nexus in the region where businesses come to conduct business. It’s not a hub to Latin America, Latin America comes here.” For example, a payment system of a bank sits in the data center. That bank connects to another bank and you eventually build an ecosystem of businesses and technology solutions that run in to that data center. CTEX, together with KPMG, Van Eps Kunneman and HB management, are going to big customers in different countries, along with the Dutch Ambassador to each respective country, and packaging Curaçao as a destination for technology — marketing the fiscal and technology benefits of Curaçao, together with Curaçao’s position in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Import and export is occurring simultaneously as CTEX exports its capability and in turn, invites customers to come to Curaçao as a location that is very secure. And, since Curaçao is part of the Dutch Kingdom, its privacy laws fall under the European Convention, which is enticing.

Besides Curaçao’s European privacy laws, another playing card for CTEX is the fiscal benefits of the island. There are zero import duties on technology, so when international companies ship their computing infrastructure to Curaçao, they pay either zero import taxes, or a maximum of 2% if they establish an operating entity on Curaçao. According to de Lima, “The combination of these assets repositions Curaçao as a destination hub to conduct business in the region, and that’s our long term vision. The more companies that run their systems and host their applications through our data center, the more it will be an open marketplace for companies to come and meet each other in the digital world here. By doing so, we not only attract companies to run applications in the data center, but they will also consider establishing an operating entity on Curaçao.”

Videoconference
Apart from its data center and cloud services, CTEX houses the region’s most advanced telepresence conference system that will be interconnected to a global videoconference network. This system allows you to meet with people anywhere there is a telepresence conference system and is set up in a way that in a matter of seconds, you forget the person isn’t actually sitting in the room with you. The facility is for professionals in a number of industries, but in particular the healthcare sector, to interact with their peers across the globe to share information and gain knowledge in new medical technologies and procedures, as well as critical diagnostic scenarios. Mr. de Lima adds, “The nice thing is, if we have a critical emergency where you need an international diagnosis, you can counsel with medical doctors anywhere in the world within a short period of time.”

CTEX will have four facilities located in Seru Mahuma, including four buildings, each with 52,000 square feet of covered space. The first building was finished in October and there are plans to start the building of the second this year (2014). All four buildings will probably be finished by 2018.

A digital commerce space
Curaçao Business Magazine asked Mr. de Lima where he would like to see CTEX in the next 10 years. He stated, “If we continue on our vision, and I just look at our pipeline of customers, I think we are well on our way to build a digital commerce space where companies come in, place their critical technologies, leverage our cloud infrastructure and come to transact business in the data center. If you look back 50-100 years ago, farmers brought their products to a physical market place. Think of CTEX as a digital marketplace, where international companies come to Curaçao to meet digitally — transact and conduct business, buy and sell in these facilities. That is one of our primary focuses.
“With that, the dream would be for me to turn Seru Mahuma into a high-end technology park, kind of like the ‘cyber-row’, where you have not only super high-end data centers, the best in the region with the latest and greatest technology, but also software development, a type of silicone valley. Surrounding it you will have all kinds of technology-related companies and all types of businesses, hotels, technology and business parks. That’s the vision for what this should be — a nexus for what the future should look like.”

Challenge
“For that to happen, a lot of things have to change on Curaçao. Our biggest challenge right now is work discipline; our work discipline has to change dramatically. This includes government, work place, everything. We have to perform at a much higher level — we have to step up and operate on an international level. If we don’t, companies are not going to look at Curaçao as a place they want to conduct business. If you are going to bring in a large corporation to run its IT operations in your data center, there’s no playing around. They have their service levels and you either have them or you don’t. Work discipline is a sensitive thing, but we should never benchmark ourselves with other islands or the region. We should benchmark ourselves with the developed world because those are the customers we are going after and they demand a certain work ethic.

“Second is knowledge. We are way behind in knowledge. People on Curaçao who are in the technology field have to get a lot more professional about how they handle technology. People have to get certifications, they have to stay current and they have to get training — it cannot be a hobby, you have to be really professional about it. We are dealing with that by partnering up with international professionals and partnering them up with the locals to raise knowledge levels, but if you want to play in the international scene, the training, knowledge and skill sets really need to improve considerably.”

During the publication of this issue, CTEX achieved TIER-IV facility certification on January 31, 2014, making it the first multi-tenant data center in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the 13th data center worldwide to achieve both design and constructed facility TIER-IV certification.