About the Data Center

In the fall of 2010, Syracuse University completed construction of a new state of the art data center, including 6,000 square feet of floor space and 450 kilowatts of power and cooling. It is now the main center for production computing resources, marrying research and administrative computing interests.

The internal data center network is a mix of 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit connectivity, with redundant connections to all hosts and network components whenever possible. The Data Center supports a robust virtual private cloud in which 98% of campus servers have been consolidated.

Syracuse University Campus Cyberinfrastructure Plan

The Data Center is connected to the campus network and the original data center via two bundles of geographically diverse, 144 strand fiber paths. This can be and has been used to provide direct connectivity between a researcher’s campus building and the hosted area in the Data Center.

Quick Facts:

Over 120,000 linear feet—more than 22 miles—of wire was used in the construction of the electrical systems. Almost one mile of piping is used in the heating and cooling systems.

Because the Data Center was constructed in accordance with LEED “Building” principles, more than 99 percent of all construction waste generated so far has been recycled. That’s over 1,200 tons (about 60 truckloads) of waste that did not go to a standard landfill.

More than 25,000 linear feet of electrical conduit, equivalent to about 83 football fields or 4.5 miles, has been used on the project.


Exterior of Data Center
The internal Data Center network is a mixture of 10, 40 and 100 Gigabit connections with redundant connections to all hosts and network components whenever possible.

The Data Center supports a robust virtual private cloud in which 98% of campus servers have been consolidated.   This includes servers (both research and operational) on campus that were housed in poor environmental conditions within distributed locations.

Syracuse University Campus Cyberinfrastructure Plan

Data Center Hosting for Researchers

Syracuse University Data Center

Roughly half of the space in the Data Center is hosted space designed to provide a secure physical environment that is flexible enough to allow access to the equipment by researchers and graduate assistants. The hosted area is caged, and provides a separate entrance that allows access through a combination of ID cards, biometric finger prints, and PIN numbers. Over two-thirds of the computing load in the Data Center serves research computing needs. Researchers on campus are able to rely on having space in the Data Center that is very low cost and provides ideal environmental conditions for their equipment with power redundancy from the multiple layers of protection including the traditional electric grid, a dual UPS configuration and generator backup.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

Machinery Hall (MH), the older data center utilized prior to the construction of the Data Center, has been repurposed into a DR site. Backup computing and storage capacity purposed for use in case of a disaster is currently available at the MH location. Anticipating that this computing capacity will typically be sitting idle, it is leveraged via a private virtual cloud for research computing. Researchers are able to use this capacity free of charge for their academic work.