data center
managed services
hosting 
cloud
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Colocation and managed hosting provider Latisys (www.latisys.com) announced on Monday that it has completed a significant physical expansion of its 86,000-square-foot Tier III-plus Chicago-area data center.
The company says the expansion is designed to meet its singificant growth. The company has doubled the size of its Chicago employee base since the beginning of the year and expects to grow staff at the Chicago-area data center by an additional 33 percent over the next six months.
Phase 1 of the expansion project brings an additional 9,000 square feet of high density raised floor to Latisys' Oak Brook, Illinois data center.
This additional space is already 70 percent sold, and the data center now has 70 customers that are using Latisys' managed hosting, colocation and disaster recovery services.
"An increasing number of organizations are turning to our suburban Chicago facility as a cost-effective, secure and seamless way to address their long term need for additional data center space, power and services," says John McCreary, general manager of Latisys. "The completion of the first phase of our facility expansion and employee growth reflect Latisys' commitment to providing customers with the scalability, flexibility and agility to grow and thrive."
Latisys is also currently constructing the second phase of the expansion project, which will add an additional 13,000 square feet of high density raised floor space to the Oak Brook facility in Q3 2009.
A couple of other data center operators also recently announced data center expansions in the Chicago area.
Colocation and peering provider CoreSite completed 2MW expansion at its downtown Chicago data center in June, and Telx completed a 15,000-square-foot expansion at its downtown Chicago data center earlier this month.
