SAO PAULO, BRAZIL — At the inaugural Uptime Institute Brazil Network meeting in Sao Paulo this week, a panel of top South American data center design firms answered questions from data center owners and operators on the top trends in the Brazil region.

According to the panelists, modular data center designs are becoming increasingly common in Brazil. The panelists also said Brazil’s data center designs tend to look more like European installations with smaller data center deployments than are typically built in the U.S.

The data center design panel also noted that economization or free cooling is becoming viable in Brazil as data center operators start raising inlet air temperatures. But Brazil’s climate can complicate issues, and mechanical cooling for some part of the year is still necessary.

Below are more photos from this week’s event in Sao Paulo.

In 2008, Fujitsu UK built a 7.5 megawatt data center in North London to service the company’s large outsourcing customers and to launch a cloud computing offering. The customers for these services were largely government and financial sector and demanded data center design and operational excellence, so Fujitsu decided to pursue independent certification of its new data center.

Fujitsu’s North London Data Centre earned Uptime Institute Tier III Certification, but the company didn’t stop there. Fujitsu wanted to ensure that its world class facility was being managed to the highest level of availability, so the company pursued and earned Uptime Institute Operational Sustainability Gold.

In this video, Fujitsu’s data center operations team discusses what they learned through the Data Center Tier Certification and Operational Sustainability processes. They also discuss the nature of providing trusted IT services as a cloud and outsourced data center provider.

The Fujitsu data center operations team also takes you on a virtual tour of this data center, explaining the various facilities components in detail, discussing the various decisions that went into the design.

This week, Uptime Institute’s EMEA Network (see members here) will meet in St. Albans, north of London, UK, to network with peers and share information in a vendor-free setting. Network members will be attending a tour of Fujitsu’s North London data center, and offering detailed analysis and feedback on the facility.

Photo below of Fujitsu’s Head of Data Center Operations UK Mark Kerr, demonstrating machine room controls at the North London site:

Uptime Staff Ken Brill, Pitt Turner and Shawn Novak will be leading breakout sessions. Rick Schuknecht, Vice President Uptime Institute Network will present a panel on the future of the Uptime Institute Network including extended (Global) reach and new social media platforms. And Harkereet Singh, Thomson Reuters, EMEA Chair of The Green Grid, will discuss collaboration with The Green Grid on its new Data Center Maturity Model.