Indiana University's $32.7 million data center in Bloomington.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Indiana University (www.indiana.edu) announced on Monday it will open the Indiana University Data Center, a $32.7 million facility designed to store the IU's networking, computer processing and data storage equipment.
The data center announcement is one of several new university data centers to be revealed this year. In May, IBM teamed up with Syracuse University to build a $12.4 million, energy-efficient data center. And in June, EMC, Cisco, MIT and the University of Massachussetts revealed they may potentially build a new $100 million data center in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
The grand opening ceremony will take place Thursday at 3:30 p.m. at the data center, located at 2737 E. 10th St. in Bloomington. The ceremony will include remarks by IU president Michael McRobbie, followed by a reception and tours of the facility.
The new data center will house the university's digital and technological assets, including the supercomputers Big Red and Quarry and the Bloomington hub of Indiana's statewide I-Light network.
The building spans 82,700 gross square feet, including three 11,000-square-foot computer equipment rooms, making it the largest data center among higher education institutions in the state of Indiana, and among the largest regionally.
The IU data center, along with the adjacent IU Innovation Center and the recently-funded, 118,000-square-foot planned Cyberinfrastructure Building, form the basis of a new IU Bloomington technology park being designed to expand north to the IU Cyclotron Facility.
"Indiana University's core information technology infrastructure plays an absolutely essential part in the university's education and research mission," says McRobbie. "It is almost impossible in this day and age for a great university like IU not to have first rate IT facilities and infrastructure. At the same time, the quality and excellence of this infrastructure and facilities have for over a decade consistently provided the base for large grants for new IT research facilities culminating in the recent $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation for Future Grid."
The data center is critical for IU's faculty, students and research staff to conduct innovative research. The $15-million FutureGrid project, primarily funded by the National Science Foundation, is already proving the value of the facility.
Professor Geoffrey C. Fox, director of the IU Pervasive Technology Institute's Digital Science Center and a professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing at Bloomington, is leading a collaboration with academic and industry partners throughout the US and in Europe that could further advance supercomputing. New supercomputers will be housed in the data center for FutureGrid research.
The facility also protects mission-critical information technology systems such as systems for teaching and learning that support more than 115,000 faculty, staff and students across the state.
The bunkered, concrete structure is designed to withstand flooding, power outages or an F5 tornado. The facility will protect computers, servers and data storage units holding more than 2.8 petabytes of information.
 |
PREVIOUS: Ubuntu.com Suffers Intermittent Outages As Thousands Download Karmic Koala | | | NEXT: SingleHop Celebrates Its Doubling of Year‐Over-Year Revenues with 14,000-Foot-Skydive |  |
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
Comment anonymously or log into your WHIR account
Logging in allows enhanced commenting features (such as external linking) in news, features, blogs and more.