An existing two-story, concrete and pre-cast central receiving building was converted into a 30,125-square-foot data center space for the University of Texas at Austin. This highly-reliable data center contains 9,400 square feet of raised floor space that provides maintainability without interrupting facility infrastructure. This level of functionality is needed to meet the current demand for space, power and cooling for critical IT services that support the University’s administrative, academic and research computing.
With existing campus data centers at their full capacity, the new data center provides a large, reliable, highly efficient and centralized location, reducing the proliferation of department-specific data centers on the UT campus. It has full redundancy for power and cooling systems, which eliminates the single points-of-failure in the data center facility infrastructure.
The team used BIM to test alternate MEP systems for energy savings. Using a Revit model of the facility, the team found that revamping the cooling system would add about $1.2 million to the budget, but save the client more than $60 million in total cumulative plant costs over the building’s 12 year-life cycle.
