Indianapolis-based based Ivy Tech Community College says it will avoid spending $18 million-plus to build a new data center by signing a partnership with IUPUI.

Instead, Ivy Tech will pay $47,000 annually to lease data-storage space from Indiana University.

Indiana University President Michael A. McRobbie and Ivy Tech Community College President Thomas J. Snyder announced the deal Tuesday morning at the Statehouse. The agreement will allow Ivy Tech to move a major portion of its computer servers and file systems that house Ivy Tech’s student-information records to IU’s Data Center at IUPUI.

IU opened its IUPUI data center as part of the Informatics and Communications Technology Complex in 2004 and a separate IU-Bloomington data center in 2009. The university uses the two data centers to maximize resources and support data-disaster recovery.
 
The creation of the Bloomington data center and multi-year effort to consolidate IT infrastructure freed up a portion of the IUPUI data center.

“Ivy Tech’s data center was too old and too small to expand to meet the growing needs of the college, and did not meet standards in several building codes,” said Snyder said.  “With this agreement, Ivy Tech can utilize a modern facility for critical equipment and not attempt to retrofit an old facility to meet the IT demands of the 21st century, saving taxpayers and students of Indiana millions of dollars.”