One excellent city to consider when looking for a location to host your IT hardware is Chicago. Data Centers in Chicago benefit from the city's incredible concentration of technically competent workers as well as its relative isolation from the natural disasters which threaten data centers in other cities, such as Los Angeles or Seattle. Although fairly expensive when it comes to real estate, Chicago is home to many data centers.
The "Windy City" is known for many things; the Bears, Northwestern University, and its often cutthroat political environment all pop into mind when thinking about Chicago. Data Center locations may not top the list of notable Chicago landmarks, but are nevertheless vital components of the economy. The sheer quantity of universities in the Chicago area, including Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Roosevelt University, and the University of Chicago just to name a few, means that tech graduates are plentiful and affordable.
Chicago boasts numerous cultural attractions, as well as foreign travel opportunities just across the Great Lakes in Canada. Chicago is known as a hip, unique city in which to live, an urban environment on the same level as New York or Los Angeles.The educated population and insulation from natural disasters has made Chicago a popular location for data centers in recent years. Chicago data centers have been built by Microsoft, Equinix, and JRM technology. Colocation services are plentiful, and affordable due to quantity of server space that has been built in recent years. Rackspace and Google also partake of the data center resources available in Chicago, and in fact one of the world's largest data centers is in Chicago. Clearly, Chicago data centers have much to offer both companies and IT employees.
This increasing number of data centers in Chicago is indicative of the strong appeal the city has for businesses and IT personnel alike. The sheer density of server space available is good for business, whether a company is looking for colocation or actually constructing its own data center. The concentration of skilled workers coupled with the nearby universities churning out hundreds of computer science graduates each year makes Chicago data centers among the premier IT hosting facilities in the United States.
Bottom line - if looking for a location to house IT infrastructure, consider a Chicago data center: the Windy City has much to offer discerning businesses.