With its recent purchase of 840 S. Canal St. in Chicago, an eight-story, 443,446-sq-ft building located downtown, Server Farm Realty, Inc. (SFRI) will take on one of the largest data center developments in the Midwest.
The property, which was originally built with a robust infrastructure to support manufacturing for General Electric, was repurposed over the years as a check-processing and back-up operations site for two of Chicago’s most prominent financial institutions. SFRI will realign the site’s 38MW of power and 250 lb/sq ft of floor loading to support a state-of-the-art data center and trading floor space, which will be available September 2011.
The site’s strategic location — its proximity to low latency fiber connecting the downtown central business and trading district — is part of a purposeful design that serves the needs of prospective customers.
“Chicago is one of the hottest data center markets in the United States,” says SFRI President and Chief Executive Officer Avner Papouchado. “We picked this location for its ability to deliver unmatched power density, high-speed connectivity and a time-to-market that is currently unavailable anywhere else in the Chicago market.”
The facility will deliver the highest levels of reliability and efficiency to the needs of Chicago’s 60 Fortune 1000 companies, 28 Fortune 500 companies, 12 Financial Times Global 500 companies, 10 Fortune Global 500 companies, and 400 other major corporations. It will feature 3.6MW of critical load on each of its five data center floors with an N+1 concurrently maintainable electrical infrastructure powered by 20 2.5MW generators housed in a dedicated exterior building.
The data center is currently accessible via numerous carriers (AT&T, Verizon, AboveNet, 360 Networks, Cogent, CFN, Fiberlink, Level 3, CenturyLink/Qwest, and Zayo) and three separate substations that will deliver 38MW of total power. The building also features 80,000 sq ft of trading space with redundant power of up to 30W/sq ft and amenities for a top line trading operation.
