MDC Features & Benefits

The facility includes:

  • Reliable and redundant infrastructure, includes short-term uninterruptible power supplies designed to provide time to shut-down the equipment during power outages without overheating.
  • State of the art design high-density, high-performance computing.
  • Ambient air cooling systems used for 75% of the year, reduces the overall energy required for cooling the facility.
  • Redundant fire protection systems, including a dry standpipe sprinkler system.
  • Standard 100 Gb/s networking connections provide the appropriate level of availability needed by units across campus via redundant fiber connections to the university backbone and multiple Cisco router switches.
  • Advanced facility security systems, card scanning systems, cameras, closed circuit television, and monitoring to restrict access to appropriate Data Center Operations personnel and approved faculty and staff.
  • Data security systems.
  • 24/7 maintenance and technical support, including 24/7/365 on-call support after business hours.
  • Modular “POD” technology which substantially decreases the cost and time needed to construct, engineer, or replace data centers as needed by the university. The two MDC pods are attached to a small permanent building used for staff, staging, and maintenance.

Certification & Standards

The MDC is a classified Tier 1 data center, as defined by the Uptime Institute. This means that the facility meets the following national averages:

  • Annual Planned Downtime Maintenance of 2 times every year for less than 12 hours.
  • Annual Unplanned Downtime of 1.2 occurrences per year for less than 4.8 hours.
  • Reliability of 99% or above.