Forsythe to Break Ground on Local Data Center with 4 Football Field Footprint

The Skokie-based enterprise Forsythe Technology is expanding in the Chicago region as it officially announces plans to build a new commercial data facility in Elk Grove Village.

Construction crews plan to break ground on the 221,000-square-foot Forsythe Data Centers in March, and it will be ready for occupancy in early 2015. Once completed, Forsythe officials say it will be roughly the size of four football fields. 

This is also the tech company's first foray into the data center manufacturing business, something Vice President of Data Center Development Steve Harris says is an exciting move for the billion-dollar enterprise. Building on 42 years of IT experience and more than 10 years of data center engineering expertise, Harris says the new facility is an answer to the slew of requests they've gotten over the years.

“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,” Harris said.

And Forsythe isn't only creating a new data center, but an entirely new data center market. While many companies either turn to small data cabinets or data warehouses exceeding 10,000 square feet, executives say there isn't a middle ground for customers with IT storage needs.

That's where Forsythe hopes to land -- somewhere between the small "retail" market and the enormous "wholesale" market. They're calling it "Retail+," and the president of Forsythe Data Centers Albert Weiss says it combines the best of both worlds.

“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,” Weiss said.

What's more is the facility is being designed to comply with U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification standards for data centers and to obtain Tier III certification from the Uptime Institute, a certification currently held by approximately 60 data centers in the U.S. and 360 worldwide, few of which are colocation facilities.

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.