The Pennsylvania State University is poised to build another new data center this year. Yesterday, the university’s board of trustees approved the planning and financing to construct a new facility on the north side of the school’s University Park campus.

The new data center has been given $58 million in total project funding, which will be paid through cash reserves from the school’s Hershey Medical Center, College of Medicine and debt financing. It will be the second data center to be built at Penn State this year; in January, the school broke ground on a new facility at Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center. Both of these data centers will be tasked with enhancing the university’s high-performance computing needs, while doing so more efficiently.

Two in a row

“The increased need for a secure and robust data center at University Park arose from the expanded use of technology to provide the best education and research possible,” said Nicholas Jones, executive VP and provost.

The University Park Data Center will be a two-story facility that can support a 1.75MW load, with an option for future expansion - up to 8MW. A Penn State spokesperson told DatacenterDynamics the facility will be LEED-certified, and although it won’t be formally certified by the Uptime Institute, the university is “designing the data center to Tier I standards for research, and Tier II+ for general/administrative computing.”

Penn State will break ground on the new 55,400-sq ft facility on 6 April, with the expected completion date of August 2016.

“Having data centers at both University Park and the Penn State Hershey Medical Center will provide data protection and allow for the continuation of business in the event of a disaster,” the university explained in a press statement.

Penn State said it would use a multi-tool approach to cooling the new data center: the first stage includes heat exchangers to circulate air in the facility. Then water will be sprayed on the heat exchangers to lower the temperature of incoming air. Finally, the facility will also use mechanical cooling.

Efficiency is a priority with the new University Park facility. Penn State claims power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.19, versus a national data center average of 1.7.

“The new data center is going to consolidate many individual servers dotted all over University Park,” said the statement. “Many of these local servers are inherently inefficient and require considerable cooling, resulting in higher energy consumption. By moving at least 1 megawatt from campus to the facility, the power delivery and cooling effectiveness will be about 80 percent more efficient than if left on campus.”

“In addition to providing additional capacity and security for our campuses’ many operational and administrative needs, these new centers will ensure that Penn State remains at the cutting edge of cyberscience, enabling us to attract and retain the very best researchers, teachers and students,” added Neil Sharkey, Penn State’s VP for research.