The bunker-like shell of Indiana University's new data center was built to withstand tornadoes

A large US university has completed construction of an 80,000-plus-square-foot data center that will serve the school’s campuses and provide disaster-recovery services to government departments of the state it is located in.

Indiana University built the $33.7-million data center in Bloomfield, Ind., to replace one of its existing two. The facility being replaced was an elementary school building retrofitted to house a data center and the university felt a more specialized building was in order, said the university’s VP for Enterprise Infrastructure Dennis Cromwell.

The new data center shell was built from the ground up, using a bunker-like design in order to withstand a major tornado – something the area is prone to. It houses three 11,000-square-foot computer rooms, two of which are currently online, with the third one left for future expansion. There is room to build another pod beyond the existing three, Cromwell said.

The facility is a multipurpose data center, housing high-performance research equipment as well as regular enterprise servers, storage and networking gear. IT equipment on both sides is from a mix of manufacturers, including IBM, Sun, Dell, Hitachi and others.

The university will keep its two supercomputers and the Bloomington hub of the state’s I-Light network in the new facility. Together with IU’s second data center in Indianapolis, the data center will support all university campuses throughout the state.

The state already houses a portion of its DR assets in the Indianapolis data center and the university expects that footprint to expand into the new facility. "We entered into an agreement with the State of Indiana because it was a good thing for us to support the state,” Cromwell said.

While the Indianapolis facility is comparatively small, it is about 50 miles away from the Bloomfield one, providing geographical redundancy for a number of systems.

The new raised-floor data center does not use hot-aisle or cold-aisle containment, Cromwell said. It does take advantage of an air-side economizer and an efficient chilled-water loop. Because it is a multipurpose facility, three different UPS systems are deployed there.

The main UPS – supporting enterprise IT equipment and some research equipment – is flywheel-based, with generator back-up. Because telecommunications equipment in the data center requires a certain amount of DC power, there is also a battery-based UPS system.

A portion of research equipment is supported by another small battery-based UPS unit.

Smith Group, a Washington, D.C., architectural firm, acted as the data center’s primary architect. Other firms that participated in the project included Indianapolis-based Ratio Architects and EYP Mission Critical Facilities – an HP-owned organization – besides others.