– Steve Harris, Vice President of Forsythe Data Center Development, says:
The Chicago-based tech giant Forsythe Technology is officially entering the data center manufacturing space by announcing plans to construct a new type of data facility just outside of Chicago – a data center colocation facility.
Named Forsythe Data Centers, the facility is slated to be ready for occupation in the spring of 2015. The new colocation data center will be 221,000-square-feet, or roughly the size of four football fields, and offer unique features unseen in the market today.
The new facility is building on Forsythe’s 42 years of IT experience and more than 10 years of data center engineering expertise, offering fully private client suites within the data center. These suites offer the security and privacy companies typically find with 10,000+ square foot wholesale offerings, combined with the flexibility and modularity of retail cages. In addition, the private client suites have added benefits of hard-walls, scalable power densities, and operational efficiency options.
The experts at Forsythe are coining it “Retail+,” a blend between traditional retail and wholesale data centers.
“After many years of listening to the needs of our clients and helping them build data centers and find colocation data center space, we made sure this data center facility has everything they have been asking us for,” said Forsythe vice president of data center development Steve Harris.
Each tenant will have the ability to control their suite’s cooling, power supply, physical security and operational facilities. It will combine the turn-key convienence of a wholesale data center with the flexibility and modularity of retail cages, finding the best of both worlds between everything from scalability to contract length and pricing.
Tenants will be able to scale their data needs in 1,000-square-foot increments. That’s combined with electrical (2N UPS) and mechanical (N+1 precision air conditioning) control options to provide tenants with density choices ranging from 200 to 300 watts per square foot.
“Forsythe’s facility offers the flexibility and agility of the retail data center market, in terms of size and shorter contract length, with the privacy, control and density of large-scale, wholesale data centers,” said Albert Weiss, president of Forsythe Data Centers, Inc., the new subsidiary managing the center. He is also Forsythe Technology’s executive vice president and chief financial officer.
The facility is being designed, engineered, powered and constructed with assistance of Environmental Systems Design, Inc., Duke Realty, Turner Construction, Emerson Network Power, Anixter and Commonwealth Edison.
