The Texas A&M University System’s South Texas Data Center Comes Online
Texas A&M University System institutions located near the Gulf Coast can rest easier about the safety of their data and the functionality of their information technology systems should another storm like Hurricane Harvey make landfall. On Thursday, System officials announced the launch of the South Texas Data Center, which will efficiently enhance System operations while providing a safe location for data storage.
Located far from the coast on the campus of Texas A&M University-San Antonio, the data center services all of the System’s academic institutions in the region, including Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and Texas A&M International University.
“This is a great example of the benefits to a university of being in a system,” said A&M System Chancellor John Sharp. “By pooling System resources, we are able to provide necessary technology and services to multiple universities in a way that both saves money and offers better services from a safer location than these institutions can provide individually.”
A&M System Chief Information Officer Mark Stone said this center has been in the works since early 2016. Knowing that the System wanted to consolidate data center operations into a single South Texas location, the CIOs of the participating universities banded together and proposed a software-defined data center solution.
“This solution allowed the institutions to immediately leverage existing data center assets and to jointly share all future compute and storage purchases,” said Stone. “This virtual data center enables each institution to have better tools and greater capacity while taking advantage of each institutions’ unique strengths.”
The South Texas Data Center is a virtual and distributed data center model. It is part of a larger effort on the part of the four South Texas universities to strategically place infrastructure and network capabilities to ensure operations and reduce downtime in the event of natural disaster.
About The Texas A&M University System
The Texas A&M University System is one of the largest systems of higher education in the nation, with a budget of $4.55 billion. Through a statewide network of 11 universities and seven state agencies, the Texas A&M System educates more than 148,000 students and makes more than 22 million additional educational contacts through service and outreach programs each year. System-wide, research and development expenditures exceeded $972 million in FY 2016 and helped drive the state’s economy.
Contact: Laylan Copelin
Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications
(979) 458-6425
(512) 289-2782 cell
lcopelin@tamus.edu