The Potawatomi Business Development Corporation (PBDC), the economic diversification arm of the Forest County Potawatomi, will break ground and hold a tribal blessing ceremony on Monday, May 7 at 11 a.m. to mark the start of construction of a $36 million multi-tenant wholesale data center in Milwaukee.
The two-story, 45,000 square-foot data center known as Data Holdings, LLC, is located at the tribe’s 11-acre Concordia Trust Property site at the intersection of 33rd and State Streets.
The Milwaukee Institute, a non-profit information technology organization that provides cloud-based-technical computing systems, plans to locate its third phase of storage and computing resources at Data Holdings. The resources will help facilitate modeling, simulation and visualization studies of regional grand challenge problems.
Several other potential tenants also have signed letters of intent to lease space in the facility.
“Currently, there is not a data center in southeastern Wisconsin that has the level and scale of technology that Data Holdings offers,” said Dan McGrath, a data center industry executive. “Additionally the proximity to Illinois will make this data center attractive to Chicago and Northern Illinois businesses.”
McGrath is founder of TMI and co-founder/CEO of NewAge Data Solutions. The PBDC has engaged TMI, one of the nation’s leading data center services companies, to design the Data Holdings center. NewAge Data Center Solutions, a TMI affiliate, will manage marketing, sales and operations.
The Data Holdings’ facility will be a wholesale, Tier III enhanced, carrier neutral data center. The center’s office space and dedicated data suites will offer tenants a cost-effective, flexible, secure and highly reliable IT facility for primary data center and secondary disaster recovery data center needs. Tenants best suited for the center are medium to large businesses that need at least 1,000 square-feet of information storage space but prefer not to invest in building their own site.
”In addition to its commitment to providing regional users with facilities appropriate for their administrative computing needs, Data Holdings is building a modern datacenter with redundant power, cooling and communications capabilities required for high-performance research computing systems,” said Jay Bayne, Ph.D., executive director of the Milwaukee Institute. “We’re proud to support Data Holdings in addressing the region’s growing appetite for academic and commercial research computing applications. Both of these activities require secure high-availability space for and fast network access to large and expanding data storage resources.”
“This ground breaking and blessing marks the beginning of exciting phase of new development at the Tribe’s Concordia Trust Property/Wgema Campus,” said Kip Ritchie, PBDC chief operating officer and Potawatomi tribal member. “We are grateful to tribal leadership past and present for their vision and commitment to the data center and broader development projects at the Concordia site.”
Greenfire Management Services, a PBDC-subsidiary, will lead the Data Holdings construction with tenant occupancy targeted for the second quarter of 2013.
