Data Center Infrastructure Improvement

CCR is working in collaboration with UBIT, UB Facilities, and the VPRED's office on a university-wide initiative to expand and create more flexible data center space across all of UB's campuses.  Projects like the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education, the new AI & Society Department, and NY State's Empire AI Consoritum all require data center space, power, and cooling for their state-of-the-art computing systems.

Data Center Expansion

With the AI boom coming to UB, CCR has outgrown our space and will be expanding our footprint to an external tier 4 data center.  CCR is expanding externally to alleviate some of the load on the UB infrastructure, while the University works on a long term solution for data center space for all of UB's needs.

The majority of CCR's high performance computing resources will be relocated in the coming months.   Preparation for this move has been in the works since the start of the year.  Technical staff have planned and bolstered the network infrastructure to support equipment in two locations, as well as begun preparations for a staged move.  We intend to conduct this move with as little downtime to our services as possible.  Initial plans include:

  • Networking fully tested and in production in external data center prior to move.
  • A secondary storage system located in the external data center will provide multi-site availablity and improved performance regardless of where compute and service nodes are physically located.
  • Only a subset of compute node racks will be marked offline at any given time so that there are always compute nodes in the UB-HPC cluster available for computations.  We will not bring the entire center offline at the same time.
  • A schedule for faculty cluster moves will be shared with affected PIs as soon as it is available.  If you have specific deadlines or constraints where you require the use of your nodes, please contact CCR Help so that we can attempt to work around your needs.
  • The LakeEffect Research cloud will remain in CCR's data center at CBLS and have no extensive outage.  There will be a short network outage in the coming month required for testing that will be communicated with cloud users.

Details of our data center relocation are currently in development.  As soon as more information is available, we will publish it to this project page.

We appreciate that the research groups and courses that utilize our resources are time-constrained and depend on the systems being available 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.  We pride ourselves in having provided these services and 99.9% uptime to UB's research community since 1999.  We are working with every intention to make this data center relocation project swift, effective, and with as little impact on CCR's users as possible.  

CCR users with feedback or questions about this project are encouraged to submit a ticket in the CCR Help client portal.

Tentative Project Schedule:

  • Testing & preparation: Completed
  • Equipment moves start: August 11, 2025
  • CBLS data center power outage for UPS upgrade:  August 8-11, 2025
  • CBLS data center power outage #2: September 3-4, 2025
  • Equipment moves completed: November 4, 2025
  • CBLS building power outage:  November 8, 2025
Detailed Schedule