Colocation – In Chicago, a Cool New Data Center Option

For Chicago-area companies that need big-time computing power and resources but can’t afford millions for their own offsite data centers, new help is on the way.

This spring, the Cyber Continuity Center, a high-density colocation data center 35 miles west of the Windy City, will open, serving midsize (Fortune 100 to 500) companies, says Bob Lacy, executive vice president. Customers will pay a per-rack fee for server space, monitoring and related services.

Additional fees cover ¿a carte services such as incident tracking and data recovery.

The 62,000-square-foot building is windowless, made of reinforced concrete and far enough from Chicago’s business epicenter that it won’t be affected by interruptions to city power grids. It exceeds the Uptime Institute’s Tier III Data Center designation. As you’d expect, energy efficiency poses major concerns: The center is built around American Power Conversion’s InfraStruXure architecture for high-density blade server deployments. (InfraStruXure integrates power, cooling, security and related services.) The center’s APC racks are cooled by large chillers that circulate cold water via pipes.

Mid-market CIOs can expect more colocation centers like this in the future, says Jed Scaramella, a research analyst at IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher).