EarthLink, an IT services and communications provider, opened its newest data center located at 350 East Cermak Road, Chicago, Illinois. EarthLink also opened a new local sales office and is growing its employee base to fulfill business demand for its highly-secure, comprehensive IT solutions including; cloud hosting, Cloud Workspace, managed security, Cloud Server Backup and application solutions in the Chicago metro area.

Michael D. Toplisek, EarthLink Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, said opening a data center in Chicago is an important step in the firm’s strategy to create a regionally-diverse, expanded IT solutions footprint to support the growing and evolving needs of companies as they seek to virtualize their businesses. "Chicago is at the heart of the Midwest business market and an important communications hub and distribution point for IP traffic," he said. "Our robust, new Chicago data center leverages a state-of-the-art, integrated computing and storage platform with the power, space and cooling capacity necessary to scale to support current and future IT service demands."

Leveraging geographically-diverse data centers, EarthLink is creating fault-tolerant, enterprise class IT solutions with nationwide availability and high performing network connectivity, the company said. In addition to Chicago, last month EarthLink opened its Dallas, Texas data center, and will introduce the new data centers in San Jose, California and Miami, Florida in the coming months.

The company said these four new data centers, in addition to the existing center in Pittsford, NY, provide the company with a total of five data centers on its next generation cloud hosting platform. Combined with EarthLink's current data centers in Atlanta, GA,Columbia, SC and Marlborough, MA, EarthLink will soon operate 8 data centers linked to its nationwide IP network.