Northern Trust Plans $50M Rochelle Site
Chicago-based financial services firm Northern Trust Corp. will build a $50 million data center in Rochelle, Illinois, the company said late Monday. City officials said last week that the town's second major data center project had been finalized, but did not identify the tenant. Northern Trust joins Allstate, which broke ground on a 52,000-square-foot data center in January.
Northern Trust will build an 80,000-square-foot data center in the new Rochelle Business and Technology Park. "The decision to locate the new Northern Trust data center in our Business and Technology Park sends a strong message to the business world that Rochelle is a great place to locate facilities dependent upon state-of-the-art fiber-optic technology," City Manager Ken Alberts told BusinessRockford.
Posted by Rich Miller 
April 16, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
April 14, 2008
$50 Million Data Center for Chicago Suburb
Rochelle, Illinois is about to get a second major data center project. A "nationally recognized" company will build a $50 million data center in the new Rochelle Business and Technology Park, according to city officials, who say they will reveal the tenant's identity tonight.
Allstate Insurance Co. has announced plans to build a 50,000 square foot data center facility in Rochelle, a western suburb of Chicago. The company is reported to be spending $50 million in the facility, and will receive $278,000 in tax incentives and job training funds from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Posted by Rich Miller April 14, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
March 27, 2008
MaximumASP Opens Chicago Data Center
Managed IT services provider MaximumASP has opened a new data center in Chicago, the company said this week. The 22,000 square foot facility will provide off-site disaster recovery for MaximumASP's existing Louisville data center, offering SAN-to-SAN data replication via a private connection to allow rapid-restore capabilities in both locations.
"This expansion was a no-brainer for us and was driven by customer demand and a need for a separate new high-power-density location," said Wade Lewis, MaximumASP's Managing Partner. "We work hard to stay on top of all the latest developments in the IT infrastructure industry. With that priority in mind, and the steady growth of our customers, a data center expansion was a necessary move for us. After an extensive nationwide search Chicago was the location of choice for us."
Posted by Rich Miller March 27, 2008 | Permalink | Newsletter
November 27, 2007
Stargate Sets Opening of Chicago Site
Stargate Colocation will officially open its new 86,000 square foot data center in Oak Brook, Illinois with an open house on Dec. 4, the company said this week. The StarGate facility is the latest in a series of data center announcements and openings in the busy Chicago market. The new facility will hold up 2,200 cabinets, with a hot-aisle containment system for temperature control that will allow it to host high-density blade server installations.
Stargate will offer tours of the new data center at 3 pm. You can register online or check out a virtual tour of the facility on the company's web site at Stargate.com (which is one of the Web's oldest domains, registered in August 1986).
Posted by Rich Miller November 27, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
November 08, 2007
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."
Posted by Rich Miller November 08, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
September 27, 2007
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."
Posted by Rich Miller September 27, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 31, 2007
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.
Posted by Rich Miller May 31, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
April 26, 2007
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.
Posted by Rich Miller April 26, 2007 | Permalink | Newsletter
December 12, 2006
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.
Posted by Rich Miller December 12, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
September 30, 2006
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."
Posted by Rich Miller September 30, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
June 27, 2006
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."
Posted by Rich Miller June 27, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
June 01, 2006
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."
Posted by Rich Miller June 01, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
May 11, 2006
InterNap to Expand 11 P-NAP Centers
As expected, routing solutions provider Internap Network Services said today that it will upgrade eleven of its Private Network Access Point (P-NAP) locations to address customer's growing capacity needs in key markets. In addition to the recent completion of its first 10 Gigabit (10G) based P-NAP re-architecture in San Jose, additional upgrades are targeted in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC.
Internap's P-NAP infrastructure features proprietary route control software, which continuously monitors and redirects customer traffic across up to eight major backbones to optimize performance. As a result, Internap is able to offer 100 percent uptime and overcome various problems that may halt or degrade the performance of real-time Internet applications.
Posted by Rich Miller May 11, 2006 | Permalink | Newsletter
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