The facility is SAVVIS' second in Chicago and features approximately 20,000 square feet of raised floor space and more than 160 watts per square foot of power. It is believed SAVVIS now operates 30 data centers in the US, Europe and Asia encompassing more than 1.4 million square feet.

The company says it decided to launch the facility in response to growing customer demand in the area and to offer financial customers the ability to host their trading applications in close proximity to two major derivatives markets through SAVVIS' Proximity Hosting offering. Customers will also be able to connect to the facility with low latency Ethernet using the SAVVIS Exchange Express service.

Proximity Hosting, says SAVVIS, provides "hedge funds and the automated trading community with a low latency environment for market data and trade execution by securely hosting their application servers in an exclusive area of a SAVVIS' data center that is located close to the source servers of major exchanges and electronic communications networks."

IntercontinentalExchange is one of the two exchanges located within the new Chicago data center. Other exchanges and ECNs located in SAVVIS' Proximity Hosting environment globally include the American Stock Exchange, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, the London Stock Exchange and BATS Trading.

"We are pleased to continue our hosting infrastructure expansion in Chicago and offer SAVVIS' low latency Proximity Hosting service for the futures markets," says Varghese Thomas, VP and general manager of financial markets for SAVVIS. "This further expands our global portfolio of low latency solutions for the financial markets and is another building block in our plans to offer high availability application hosting and low latency network access for the world's leading trading venues and liquidity pools across all asset classes."

SAVVIS says it will also be offering colocation, managed hosting, virtualized and utility computing, managed networks, and managed security services at the new facility to meet the growing needs of enterprise IT.

Looking to the near future, SAVVIS says it is planning to expand the Proximity Hosting model to major exchanges in Tokyo and Singapore over the next year.

In April, SAVVIS was listed among the top managed hosting providers for growth in the last 12 months despite the dipping economy in the US, according to Tier 1 research. Confirming that growth trend, the company recently opened a new data center in London in May and its second facility in Irving, Texas in April.