New Data Center

Information Technology and Rice's Facilities, Engineering, and Planning division are in the process of building a new Data Center for Rice University. After an extensive pre-design effort, the design and construction funding for this project was approved by Rice's Board of Trustees in early 2006. The anticipated completion date for the new data center is July 2007. Additional details on the Project can be found in the F&E project web site.

Commissioning Date: July 20, 2007

After the new data center building is commissioned, it can be occupied and the transfer of servers and other equipment will begin. Watch this site for additional news on services and applications that may be temporarily unavailable during the migration of servers and clusters to their new home.

Tentative Schedule

• July 27 - Weekend Event Window*
  • Friday 6 pm to Sunday midnight in-house move of non-storage-system-dependent equipment from downtown data center to Primary Data Center.
  • Planned outage for RicePrint services 8:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. Friday, July 27. Alldepts email will be distributed on July 25.
• August 1 - extended business hours rehearsal move.
  • 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. move of approximately 20-25 non-critical servers and systems from downtown data center to Primary Data Center.
• August 3 - Storage-related Services Migration
  • Friday 5 pm to Monday 8:00 a.m. migration includes physical move of storage-system-dependent equipment from downtown data center to Primary Data Center.
  • Planned outages will include Exchange email, my.rice.edu, storage.rice.edu, OWL-Space, and other storage-dependent applications. Alldepts email was distributed July 31, individual email messages sent to all employees and graduate students August 2. Voicemail broadcast announcements distributed August 3.
• August 10 - 5:30 p.m. until midnight same evening
  • Physical move of remaining equipment from downtown data center to Primary Data Center.
  • Planned outages will include email, FAMIS, Rice web servers including content management, rooms.rice.edu, my.rice.edu, OWL-Space, and Oracle Calendar. Alldepts email will be distributed on August 8.
• August 11-12 - FAMIS migration to new data center continues.
• August 14- Planning for Mudd data center equipment migration to primary data center.
• August 15- Physical removal of any remaining hardware from downtown data center before releasing contents for salvage.
• August 17 - One hour maintenance of storage-related systems; nothing shut down but some systems may experience brief delays during the 5-6 pm maintenance window
• August 18-30 - Temporary suspension of physical data center migrations for O-week and first week of class preparations; planning and inventory preparations continue.
• August 31 - Weekend Event Window*
  • Friday 6 pm to Sunday midnight physical move of Banner equipment in Mudd data center to Primary Data Center. Banner, Esther, Edgar, Course Catalog and Schedule, Hyperion and Sevis applications will be unavailable.
• September 17 - physical move of Research Terascale Cluster (RTC)
• October 10 - 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
  • migration of one of the six owlnet computing servers (short-eared.rice.edu)
• October 12 - Weekend Event Window*
• Friday 5:00 pm to Sunday midnight physical move of Mudd servers and systems, includes the remaining five owlnet computing servers but short-eared.rice.edu will remain functional. Other services and applications which will be unavailable during this migration include: NetID account management, synchronization and password changes, VPN requests, Oracle Calendar, Dialup, Ruf, IT tutorials and other pages that live on docs.rice.edu, Filemaker Pro databases, Leadership Rice web applications, and KRTU's real audio files.
• October 19 - Weekend Event Window*
  • Friday 5:00 pm to Sunday midnight physical move of Mudd servers and systems, includes 15 servers for various applications. No campus-wide services affected.

Construction Progress

For construction images, please visit the Picasa slideshow (opens in new window) or our slides page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked questions and their answers can be found on the Data Center FAQ web page.