Football Legends Ditka, Singletary Attend Windstream's Chicago Data Center Grand Opening

Cloud and managed hosting provider Windstream Hosted Solutions held a grand opening of its Chicago data center earlier this month. The 20,000-square-foot facility, launched late last year, has more than 15,600 square feet of raised floor and is fully equipped to support Windstream’s offerings.

The grand opening included facility tours and a meet-and-greet with National Football League legends Mike Ditka and Mike Singletary. Ditka is the idol of Bill Swerski’s Chicago Superfans.

The new data center features:

Chris Nicolini, Windstream's senior vice president of cloud and data center operations, said, "In essence, the Windstream Hosted Solutions team becomes an extension of our customers' information technology staff, handling their maintenance tasks, providing compliance support for industry regulations, keeping critical data protected and making sure their business operations continue in the event of a disaster."

Among the company’s offerings is a new EMC-powered storage service. The collaboration with EMC offers customers the choice to store or back up data to multiple dedicated or shared EMC platforms in cloud-enabled data centers.

Chicago continues to be a hot data center market with continued activity both in the city proper and the suburbs.

"The Chicago multi-tenant data center market has experienced a supply/demand imbalance in the western suburbs, as well as in downtown Chicago, for several years now," said Rick ‘The Hammer’ Kurtzbein, research analyst at 451 Research. "Windstream's new ... facility offers enterprise-quality colocation services, as well as a suite of managed hosting and cloud infrastructure services, providing Fortune 1000 companies with data center services that we expect will be well-received in the active Chicago MTDC market."