Forsythe building $130 million data center in Elk Grove

Skokie-based Forsythe Technology is spending about $130 million to build a 221,000-square-foot data center at Touhy Avenue and Busse Road in Elk Grove Village.

Forsythe broke ground Wednesday and plans to have the building ready for occupancy early next year.

The company said the building will be a colocation facility, meaning Forsythe will provide space, power, cooling and physical security for the computer server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms.

"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," Albert Weiss said in a news release. Weiss, Forsythe Technology's executive vice president and chief financial officer, is president of Forsythe Data Centers, the new subsidiary managing the center.

Forsythe is developing the center to help enterprises in need of higher-density, private data center suites with dedicated power and cooling infrastructure as well as customizable physical security and operational efficiency options, according to the news release.

The center is being designed to U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification standards.

"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," Forsythe vice president of data center development Steve Harris said in the news release.

Forsythe will also be moving its Technology Evaluation Center and Integration and Configuration Center from its corporate headquarters in Skokie to the new location. About 20 people will work at the center when everything is open, all of them transferred from Skokie.

Founded in 1971, employee-owned Forsythe has 1,000 employees in 50 states and annual revenue of about $1.2 billion. It provides professional services, financial solutions and IT products to companies.