"Suburban Chicago becomes the third market for our company as we continue to execute on our plan of acquiring and growing assets that have solid infrastructure, a strong customer base, and significant expansion capabilities in Tier II and suburban Tier I markets," says Peter Stevenson, CEO of Managed Data Holdings. "In conjunction with our other data centers, we will offer a comprehensive suite of power-rich colocation, multi-homed performance-based IP routing, disaster recovery solutions, scalable managed services, and managed hosting."

Suppled by MHD, a photo of the Stargate data center in Oak Brook, Illinois.

The acquisition is another example of a growing trend toward big-money third-party investment in web hosts and data centers. In June, web hosting provider HostMySite was acquired by Wachovia Capital Partners, the private equity arm of the Wachovia Corporation bank, for example.

In addition to offering data center solutions, the acquisition enables Stargate to now offer Managed Data Holdings' existing disaster recovery, managed hosting and managed service offerings to the Chicago market.

Meanwhile, Managed Data Holdings' Chicago business will continue to operate under the Stargate brand name in the near term.

And as part of the acquisition, Managed Data Holdings says it expects to continue making success-based investments into infrastructure upgrades of the former Exodus 86,000-square-foot facility.

In addition to the impressive size and security features in place in the Stargate data center, the company hosts an extensive network of IP providers within the facility. Stargate is the most recent data center acquisition for Virginia-based Managed Data Holdings, making it the third location now operated by the privately held firm.

This latest acquisition adds to Managed Data Holding's growing portfolio of state-of-the-art data center facilities, including InteleNet Communications in Irvine, California, as well as Data393 in Englewood, Colorado, which it acquired in January.

Last week, Data393 completed its environmental initiatives at its Colorado facility to decrease its carbon footprint in support of Denver's role as host of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

The combined data space of the Stargate, Data 393, and InteleNet facilities span more than 197,000 square feet. Upon completion of SAS70 Type II certification in Chicago, all Managed Data Holdings data centers will be SAS70 Type II certified.

Managed Data Holdings actively targets state-of-the-art data centers across suburban Tier I and Tier II markets in the US to meet the increasing demand for managed hosting, managed services, colocation space and disaster recovery services required by SMB customers or divisions of large enterprises.