Latisys Expands Data Centers in Virginia, Chicago

Latisys-Ashburn

The interior of new space in the Latisys data center in Ashburn, Virginia (Photo: Latisys).

Managed hosting provider Latisys announced two data center expansions, one in Chicago and one in northern Virginia. The company is adding 10,000 square feet in Oak Brook, Ill. and 22,000 square feet in Ashburn, Virginia.

The expansions are in response to growing demand for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions, the company said. Gartner is predicting the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market will grow by 47.8% through 2015. The new space in Ashburn is available today, while the incremental expansion in Chicago will be completed in early 2013, and be available by April of that year.

Today’s Ashburn and Chicago announcements come on the heels of a new 87,000 sq. ft. facility in Denver (announced 9/11) more than doubling Latisys’ footprint in Colorado, and an incremental build out in Southern California of 13,000 square feet of new space with 1.8 megawatts of critical power.

Building out its IaaS Platform

While expansion was partially driven by regional demand, combined, it’s an expansion of what Latisys views as its national IT Infrastructure as a Service platform. The company has a unified, hybrid platform. The end-to-end IT outsourcing platform includes colocation, managed hosting and cloud. In terms of managed services, it offers network management, managed server hosting, server virtualization, storage, backup, replication and security services.

Ashburn is the east coast hub for Latisys, while Chicago is its Midwest hub. Denver acts frequently as a disaster recovery site, while Irvine, CA is the west coast hub. Combined, it makes Latisys ideal for production workloads, and a cloud play for the enterprise, with multiple regions available.

Ashburn

In Ashburn, Latisys has expanded its campus, with the availability of 22,000 square feet of space as well as 4.4 megawatts of new critical power, along with rack-based cooling designed to achieve 40 KW per cabinet. The Ashburn campus supports Latisys’ Enterprise Cloud Platform, which allows rapid on-demand provisioning with infrastructure on a pay as you go basis. In Ashburn, it serves enterprises and government organizations. Incremental data center capacity also enhances Latisys’ disaster recovery services for current and prospective customers looking for reliable multi-site redundancy in an area known for low risk of natural disasters.

“Washington and the mid-Atlantic region features a high concentration of large enterprises and government organizations dealing with rapidly expanding and increasingly complex IT and cloud environments,” said Peter Stevenson, CEO of Latisys. “We focus on helping them make a successful transition from conventional IT to more dynamic hybrid and cloud environments that today underpin the vast majority of large organizations and likely have hidden costs.”

Chicago

Construction has also commenced on an additional 10,000 square feet of high density space in Chicago, as well as adding 1.35 MW of additional power. The expansion is to its CHI2 facility, a 49,000 square foot Tier III facility adjacent to CHI1. Construction of the new space is expected to be completed by the end of Q1 2013, and ready for customer deployment in April of that quarter.

The Oak Brook, Illinois-based data center serves as the Midwest hub for Latisys’ national IT Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, which includes Denver as an ideal disaster recovery site and southern California and Northern Virginia as gateways to Asia Pacific and Europe. The facility is in close proximity to downtown Chicago and CME.

Latisys says it is seeing healthy demand in Chicago. “As one of the country’s premium transportation and high speed connectivity hubs, Chicago continues to grow as a destination of choice for outsourced IT infrastructure services— particularly among large enterprises,” said Scott Moerman, Regional Sales Director of  Latisys in Chicago. “This investment helps ensure that the Latisys data center campus, managed hosting and cloud platform continue to lead the way for businesses for whom change is constant and a truly agile IT infrastructure partner is an imperative.”

CHI2 is tied directly to existing fiber carriers in the buildings, monitored 24x7x365 by on-site NOC personnel and systems, and operated under SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 audited controls, which replaces SAS 70.

“Latisys’ expansion reflects our commitment to ensuring that new and existing customers have immediate access to high density and highly flexible IT solutions optimized to current requirements and scalable to future business needs,” said Stevenson. ”Chicago is a key component of our national IT services platform for which we continue to see accelerating demand for high performance, highly secure, hybrid IaaS."Latisys has the power and cooling capabilities to deliver 175-200 watts per sq ft of usable data center space in Chicago.

Latisys focuses on providing ultra-high density space, through seven Tier III data centers across the U.S. and a platform of solutions that span colocation, managed hosting and cloud.  It is one of those all-in-one providers that can deal with both colocation requests and cloud, and everything in between, viewing its facilities as the backbone of a larger all-encompassing portfolio strategy instead of just space. Latisys’ total data center footprint exceeds 500,000 square feet across seven data centers in four major markets.Latisys Enterprise Cloud platform enables companies to rapidly provision on-demand, pay-as-you-go IT infrastructure services.