WiredTree Plans 60,000SF Chicago Facility

Managed hosting provider WiredTree will expand into 60,000 square feet of new data center space at 427 LaSalle Street in Chicago, the company said today. 427 LaSalle was bought in May by CRG West, which said at the time that it would renovate the building to add six megawatts of emergency back-up power.

WiredTree was founded in June 2006, and is among the new providers offering a “network within a network” design combining public and private networks. After just a year, the company needs more data center space.

“After an extensive evaluation process, we selected this facility because it has the redundant infrastructure and controls in place that our mission-critical hosting requires,” said Zac Cogswell, WiredTree president. “Not only has the facility been recently renovated, it’s located just a couple of blocks from our corporate headquarters in downtown Chicago.”

Allstate Plans 50,000SF Illinois Data Center

Allstate Insurance Co. has announced plans to build a 50,000 square foot data center facility in Rochelle, Ill., a western suburb of Chicago. The company, which recently bought 25 acres of land in the Rochelle Technology Park, is reported to be spending $50 million in the facility. The insurer will be the first tenant in the 160-acre business park, and receive $278,000 in tax incentives and job training funds from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

“This new data center facility will provide Allstate with additional hosting capacity for its business applications,” said Catherine Brune, Allstate’s Chief Information Officer. “We expect to make an additional multi-million dollar investment for computer related equipment in the facility over the next several years.”

The company spent three years scouting locations in the Midwest before choosing Rochelle, according to CB Richard Ellis Vice-President Chad Freese. “We were all over the region, including Wisconsin and Indiana, and there were 29 locations we were originally looking at,” Freese told local media. “During the last 18 months we narrowed the selection down to three finalists and it became clear Rochelle had the most going for it in the Midwest. These city leaders in Rochelle are the most forward thinking and enterprising individuals when it comes to competing for projects like this. They have really positioned Rochelle well for the future.”

Huge Spec Data Center Planned in Chicago

Property management company Koman Group and IT facilities specialist Ascent Corp. are teaming on a joint venture to build a 441,000 square foot data center in North Lake, Illinois (Chicago market). The $175 million project at 601 Northwest Ave. is being built on a speculative basis for one to eight tenants, according to Globe Street, a real estate trade publication.

Construction is expected to commence this summer and be completed in early 2008. The facility is being planned for 40 megawatts of power, with the capability to expand to 60 megawatts, according to Jones Lang LaSalle, which is the leasing agent for the project. The developers say they will have a dedicated substation on the 12-acre property, with power available at 5 cents per kilowatt hour. The facility will be two stories, with 21-foot ceilings.

In announcing the enormous project, the developers cite “a lack of quality data centers in the market today.” While that reflects the consensus view in the industry, comments in the Globe Street article will probably raise an eyebrow or two.

Energy Exchange Consolidates In Chicago

IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), a leading electronic energy marketplace, will consolidate its primary data center operations in Chicago, the company said this week. The relocation will consolidate a backup data center and its primary facility in a single Chicago site, with a staged transition of those services from existing data centers in London and Atlanta. ICE’s data centers support electronic markets for ICE Futures, the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) and ICE’s global over-the-counter markets.

“As our business expands both globally and domestically, the location of our key technology infrastructure in Chicago ensures we are positioned at the center of the commodities trading community and near many of our largest customers,” said Mark Wassersug, ICE Vice President of Operations.

The ICE recently launched a $9.6 billion bid to merge with the Chicago Board of Trade, topping an $8.5 billion bid by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The data center consolidation commences June 1, when ICE’s disaster recovery will relocate from London to Chicago. The disaster recovery system mirrors the ICE primary exchange system to enable a seamless transition of trading operations to a redundant platform in the event of a disaster or unexpected shutdown. In January 2008, ICE’s primary data center will permanently migrate the hosting of its trading operations to Chicago from its current site in Atlanta. The current primary data center in Atlanta will then be utilized as the permanent disaster recovery site.

AT&T Opens Centers in Chicago, Shanghai

AT&T has opened new data centers in Oak Brook, Ill. (Chicago market) and Shanghai, China, bringing its global Internet data center footprint to 1.8 million square feet. AT&T has been aggressively expanding its network this year and now operates 32 Internet data centers, including 17 in the U.S., six in Europe and nine in the Asia/Pacific region.

The new Oak Brook facility expands AT&T’s presence in the Chicago market, where it already has a data center in nearby Lisle, Ill. The Oak Brook center is near an AT&T central switching office, providing customers with connectivity to the AT&T network backbone. The company says the facility has a Tier IV site infrastructure rating from the Uptime Institute, its highest classification among data centers for reliability, and features multiple active power and cooling distribution paths. The center in Oak Brook is 12,000 square feet and already has signed up two clients, an AT&T spokesman told Crain’s Chicago Business.

The opening of AT&T’s caps a huge year for the Chicago data center market. The list of companies announcing construction or expansion projects in 2006 includes Equinix, CenterPoint Properties, Digital Realty Trust, Internap, IDC Global Networks and Hostway.

CenterPoint Plans Chicago Colo Center

CenterPoint Properties has announced that it is breaking ground on a 62,000-square-foot colocation data center at the DuPage National Technology Park in West Chicago. The build-to-suit facility, called the Cyber Continuity Center is expected to open in the spring of 2007.

The facility is the latest in a series of announcements of new data center projects in the Chicago market. The new facility will be engineered to meet Tier III classification on the Uptime Institute’s facility standards for data centers. Cyber Continuity Center will contain two separate areas managed and operated by a technical support team. One space will house multiple server racks for lease by businesses requiring data storage support, while the second section will offer “micro-suites” which function as private data centers.

“Cyber Continuity Center will be Chicagoland’s most secure co-location data center, catering to a broad range of information sensitive companies,” said Charles Foster, Cyber Continuity Center’s managing partner. “We are excited to work with CenterPoint Properties at the DuPage National Technology Park. It provides a great opportunity to bring an innovative technology product to market and deliver premier data storage and disaster recovery services to our infrastructure-intensive client base.”

Gigenet Preps New 17,000 SF Data Center

Gigenet, the parent body of web hosting brands ColoQuest, GigeServers and DDoSProtection.com, is nearing completion of a 17,000 square foot data center near Chicago. In addition to moving the bulk of its existing customer base to the new building, Gigenet also plans to relocate corporate operations.

“Our dedicated hosting and attack mitigation brands have experienced rapid growth for the past several years, and ultimately we have outgrown our old facilities,” said Derek Raines, Gigenet Vice President. “This new facility will secure our ability to both expand and provide a high level of service to our growing client base.”

Digital Realty To Build Out Space in 10 Cities

Technology landlord Digital Realty Trust (DLR) said today that it will launch a large-scale project to redevelop data center space it owns in 10 major U.S. markets. The investment represents a huge vote of confidence in the data center market amid growing demand for premium space. It also allows Digital Realty to capitalize on data center space shortages and rising prices in major Internet cities.

Demand for data center space is growing along with the Internet economy. As television and movie content moves to a digital delivery model, an enormous volume of digital files will need to be stored in data centers to provide “always on” high-speed access. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are planning huge infrastructure expansions to deliver online services and applications.

Doigital Realty’s redevelopment projects will create more than 330,000 square feet of advanced data center space, with approximately 40 megawatts (MW) of available UPS load. Sites selected for development include Digital Realty Trust facilities in Northern New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“Demand for high-quality datacenter space has been strong in each of these ten cities, which makes the timing of these redevelopment projects ideal,” said Chris Crosby, Senior Vice President of Sales and Technical Services at Digital Realty Trust. “Each of these datacenter spaces will offer the world-class technical capabilities that Digital Realty Trust facilities are known for, including outstanding electrical power availability - an increasingly rare commodity in the technology real estate market.”