When most people think of data centers, you usually think of a large, rigid building, strong enough to withstand:
- The wickedest of wind storms
- The wildest of earthquakes
- The fiercest floods
How could a Midwest data center be expandable if it is to be as resilient as these sort of “hardened” facilities need to be? The floors are raised to accommodate cabling and cooling. The racks and cabinets are generally stacked to the rafters. Servers and blades are getting smaller for sure, but expandable seems difficult.
Here are three leading data centers that offer burstable bandwidth, scalable power, and expandable floor space availability.
Steadfast Networks
Steadfast Networks certainly sounds like a reliable data center company name, but not exactly expandable per se. Yet their 725 South Wells Street Data Center offers colocation, cloud services, and dedicated hosting, and it’s also expandable from 6,000 square feet of raised floor space to 30,000. Needless to say, 500 percent expandability is pretty impressive.
They also have cooling, power, and telecommunications infrastructure all purpose-built for expandability as well. Steadfast Networks and their N+1 redundancy and other innovative networking infrastructure allows their facility to be extremely expandable. Don’t take our word for it; tour the Steadfast Networks facility and see how it can be expanded drastically.
Latisys
The Latisys Colocation data center in Chicago offers expandable colocation racks according to your unique needs. Need more power or more throughput? Latisys can deliver based on your needs and provide scalability to “future-proof” your colocation requirements.
In this Midwest data center, you can start with a full or partial cabinet and move up to a private rack or colocation suite. There aren’t any colocation penthouses, but if you need lots of power and bandwidth with high security, Latisys has what you need. They offer high-density cooling, which can reduce your data center footprint to start and give you space to grow.
Forsythe Data Centers
Forsythe Data Centers is working with a division of T5 Data Centers, a provider of wholesale data center services, which has a great deal of expertise about expandable data center “shells” as part of its wholesale model.
The Chicago data center Forsythe and T5FM (T5 Facilities Management) are collaborating on are designed and being built for maximum scalability. Private data suites will be expandable from 1,000 square feet to 4,000 square feet, with all the power, cooling, cabling, and redundancy which goes along with it. The expanded “quad suites” will be able to manage up to 112 cabinets, and will have options to start with as few as 300 square feet of rack space and scale to 4,000 square feet.
There are four football fields worth of floor space to be filled and second-floor client space, a Network Operations Center that is highly scalable, and lots of other amenities to ensure optimal expandability. T5 has built several wholesale data centers, and Forsythe has partnered with leading power and security providers in Anixter and Emerson Network Power.
These leading Midwest data centers offer burstable bandwidth, scalable power and expandable floor space availability. They were built to be scalable in order to meet clients’ future demands. Are there other Midwest data centers that should be on our list? Share your thoughts in the section for Comments below.
To follow up on the tips in this article, be sure to download your free guide to Lead Generation Best Practices for Colocation Data Centers.
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