Corelink Leases Chicago Data Center

Corelink Data Centers said today that it has expanded its network to the Chicago market, entering into a long-term lease for an 81,600 square foot facility in the Chicago suburb of Mt. Prospect. The building has 10,000 square feet of existing data center space, and Corelink plans to modify the infrastructure to support power densities of up to 200 watts per square foot, with the ability to support higher density zones.

Corelink said it has secured more than 16 megawatts of power for the facility, which will eventually be able to house up to 65,000 square feet of useable raised floor, providing ample space for expansion. The location in Mount Prospect is about 25 miles west of downtown Chicago, close to O’Hare Airport but outside of flight paths, the company said.

Corelink was founded in 2007 and is backed by M/C Ventures of Boston and has existing data centers in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Seattle. Corelink’s founder and CEO is Geoff Hampson, who has been involved in numerous startups, including Peer 1 Network Enterprises, where he served as CEO from 2000 through 2006. Corelink says it has an “active” mergers and acquisitions program and anticipates further expansion of its colocation facility footprint.

Savvis to Expand Trading Space in Chicago

Responding to growth in its proximity hosting services for financial companies, Savvis (SVVS) is expanding its data center in a key connectivity hub in Chicago, the company said today. Savvis will add approximately 10,000 square feet of raised floor space in its data center at 350 East Cermak Road facility in downtown Chicago, with new space supporting 200 watts per square foot of power.

The expansion will support growing demand from financial customers interested in hosting their trading applications in close proximity to major derivatives markets based in Chicago. Savvis ‘ facility at 350 East Cermak will now encompass approximately 30,000 square feet of raised floor and provide access to key trading venues, including the CME Group. It will also serve as one of the global delivery points for the Thomson Reuters Hosting Solution announced last year, which is being offered in six Savvis data centers around the globe.

“Chicago is an important financial center, and we are pleased to meet existing demand and expand our proximity hosting and IT infrastructure services on East Cermak,” said Varghese Thomas, global head of financial services for Savvis. “The financial services industry is increasingly moving toward converged solutions featuring high-availability application hosting and world-class network access for the leading global trading venues and liquidity pools across all asset classes.”

Savvis currently operates 28 data centers globally, with more than 1.4 million square feet of high-quality, raised floor space, which is designed to support enterprise IT operations.

McHugh Plans Major Chicago Data Center

A design concept for a six-story, 300,000 square foot data center in Chicago proposed by McHugh Construction.

McHugh Construction Co. has announced plans to build a major data center in downtown Chicago, just blocks from the city’s major Internet connectivity hub. The Chicago-based company has asked city officials to approve a six-story, 300,000 square foot data center project at 2222 South Indiana Avenue, adjacent to the McCormick Place convention center and 350 East Cermak Road, the enormous carrier hotel operated by Digital Realty Trust.

The project revives a plan for a data center at the site, which was first proposed in 2001 but shelved after the dot-com bust left an oversupply of data center space. In 2008 McHugh tried to sell the site for possible use as a hotel or entertainment complex to support the convention center. But the credit crunch made it difficult to finance those types of projects, and with demand for data center space in downtown Chicago remaining strong, McHugh revisited the data center concept.

Supply Running Low
A likely factor in the decision is the dwindling amount of space remaining at 350 East Cermak, which spans 1.1 million square feet but is 95.9 percent occupied as of Sept. 30, according to Digital Realty. The only other building in downtown Chicago with space for large footprints available is the CoreSite building at 427 South LaSalle Street.

The Emerging Market for Wireless Backhaul

Last Thursday Level 3 launched a wireless tower access service offering wireless tower operators direct connectivity to the Level 3 backbone, which would provide cost-effective options for wireless backhaul in metropolitan and rural locations. This is a growth market, according to analysts like Jennifer Pigg from the Yankee Group, who says mobile operators are scrambling to meet capacity demand and predicts that mobile data traffic will grow by an order of magnitude in the coming years. 

The towers are located in rural areas and offer voice, data and Internet services as an alternative to incumbent providers. Level 3 also offers shared infrastructure to allow wireless carriers to expand without building their own towers. 

Wireless data networks have been an increasingly hot market in recent months, according to Visiant Strategies, which examined the market in a report titled US Mobile Backhaul 2010: Continued Expansion 2009 to 2015. ”All wireless carriers in the United States are continuing to ramp up their networks with technologies that allow much greater capacity and the use of much more capacity per user, mainly a result of meaningful wireless data applications and devices, and this means much more backhaul capacity will be needed,” wrote Andy Fuertes of Visiant Strategies.

Demand Remains Strong in Key Markets

Data center demand is outpacing supply across the United States and pricing remains strong in key markets, according to the latest analysis by commercial real estate specialist Grubb & Ellis.

In a presentation Tuesday at  DataCenterDynamics Chicago, Jim Kerrigan of Grubb & Ellis said more than 20 megawatts of data center critical load was leased in the third quarter, the strongest activity thus far in 2009. Kerrigan, the director of the data center practice at Grubb & Ellis, said demand is outpacing supply by “three-fold.”

Chicago is Hottest Colo Market
Kerrigan said downtown Chicago is the hottest colocation market in the country, while northern Virginia is seeing the strongest activity in leasing of wholesale data center space.

CoreSite Opens New Space in Chicago

The interior of the new CoreSite data center expansion in Chicago.

CoreSite (formerly CRG West) has completed 20,000 square feet of new space at the company’s Chicago data center at 427 South LaSalle Street, the company said today. The new space, located in the heart of the financial district, will accommodate demand for data center space in downtown Chicago. It expands the existing footprint at the LaSalle Street site, where CoreSite has about 30 existing data center and colocation customers.

The new space is supported by 2N emergency generator back-up power as well as an N+1 cooling and UPS configuration. It features a raised-floor design with a return-air plenum, allowing for hot aisle containment to maximize energy efficiency.

Continuum to Open Chicago Data Center

Colocation provider Continuum Data Centers, LLC will open a new data center in Lombard, Illinois this month. Continuum said today that it has chosen AboveNet, Inc. (ABVT) to provide the backbone for its high-bandwidth transport from its 20,000 square foot data center in Lombard to AboveNet’s Oak Brook, Illinois point of presence (POP).

The new facility is the latest opening in an increasingly active Chicago data center market. “This data center has been specifically designed to give organizations the service, support and pricing that has been missing in the Chicago suburban colocation market,” said Tom Chaffin, Managing Partner of Continuum. “We feel AboveNet is a key ingredient to the success of our data center. AboveNet provides exceptional services and is the backbone of our transport network.”

Inside Allstate’s New Data Center

Allstate Insurance Co. recently completed a 50,000 square foot data center in Rochelle, Ill., a western suburb of Chicago. The company has put together a video providing a tour of the facility, highlighting some of the energy-efficiency measures and offering a brief look at the equipment area. This video runs about 2 minutes.

Check out our Green Data Center Channel for more on this topic. For additional video, visit our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.

SingleHop Expands with ServerCentral

The DuPont Fabros CH1 facility, where SingleHop has leased space from ServerCentral.

Managed hosting provider SingleHop has expanded its footprint within ServerCentral’s 10,000 square feet of colocation space in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. SingleHop says it entered into a $2.5 million agreement with ServerCentral, which is a tenant in the DuPont Fabros Technology CH1 data center.

The new space can support power densities of 12 kilowatts per cabinet (210 watts per square foot). Its the second data center for SingleHop, which also operates a facility in downtown Chicago housing 2,000 servers. SingleHop was founded in 2006 by Chicago entrepreneurs Dan Ushman and Zak Boca and says it has annual revenue of $4.5 million.

“The additional space enables geographic redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities,” said Brandon Ewing, SingleHop’s Senior Network Engineer. “Customers will benefit as they have more room for growth and more options for redundancy. The new data center gives SingleHop a platform from which to continue heavily investing in a wide and robust network both at our original data center and the new facility.”