Rackspace Announces Expansion – Chicago Datacenter Coming Soon

Hosting company Rackspace has announced that they will be launching a Chicago datacenter in late 2009. From the announcement, “Rackspace will lease approximately 36,700 square feet of raised floor space, consisting of 5.633 megawatts of available critical load, from a subsidiary of DuPont Fabros Technology, Inc.”

Rackspace notes that their “cloud” business is what’s driving the expansion. Formerly known as Mosso, the Rackspace cloud computing division is known as the “Rackspace Cloud”. I am not sure if the entire space will be used for the cloud computing division or if other Rackspace customers will be serviced in Chicago (it looks like the latter). We currently host the CN network of sites on Rackspace.

Additional techy notes from the announcement:

• Rackspace believes that this lease with DuPont Fabros will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility.
• The Chicago facility maximizes operating efficiency through an enhanced power capacity and flexible design with N+2 redundancy on all major systems including heat rejection systems, generators and UPS systems.