As part of its Campus Sustainability Program, the University of Texas is retrofitting a former administrative building into a new data center, the Daily Texan reported Tuesday. The facility will occupy the building that used to house the school's purchasing office that was moved to the main administration building.

The $32-million data center will use hot-isle/cold-isle containment and a flywheel-based UPS system, according to the university's Web site. Heads of the IT department expect the new facility to enable greater consolidation of the institution's compute and storage resources. On its Web site the department promises greater power and cooling redundancy and better security for servers located in the facility.

Access to the data center will be controlled and it will be monitored around the clock. The university plans to complete the facility and house first occupants in May 2010.