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.
