Grand Canyon University Teams with ViaWest on Data Center Service

Grand Canyon University (GCU), a private university located in Phoenix, AZ, has expanded its IT infrastructure with the addition of a colocated data center solution.

The university has been experiencing increased enrollment and expects that trend to continue over the coming years. To support this growth, the university needed to expand its data center and wanted to do so in a way that minimized its carbon footprint. Grand Canyon University selected ViaWest’s Arizona data center to partner with for its IT infrastructure, as well as offer students opportunities to intern and learn, so the university now has two primary data centers.

GCU was initially looking to build or purchase a data center of its own but ViaWest was willing to be more than just a vendor by offering curriculum help to GCU’s computer science department along with other assistance to students according to ViaWest.

ViaWest is based in Denver with 28 data centers in seven states. The Arizona data center has 42,500-square-feet of raised floor capacity, independent backup components for redundancy, 5,400 kilowatts of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) capacity, more than 350 watts per square foot and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.

The university plans to use the Arizona data center for its production environment and as a backup for its other data center. The new data center will support its online classes, student-facing portal, email, chat and constituent relationship management (CRM) software. The transition is to take place over the summer.

In addition to the data center, the university has also partnered with ViaWest to offer more curriculum options for computer science students. As part of that expanded curriculum, students work on advanced degree programs in computer science will have opportunities to complete internships through ViaWest and tour the data center facility.

In the fall 2015, GCU students will be able to tour the data center and learn what a real-world data center is about and what it’s like to work there.