State bond-funded data center nears completion at The Jackson Laboratory

Date: April 30, 2008

Bar Harbor, Maine -- The Jackson Laboratory is constructing a new, state-of-the-art data center on its Bar Harbor campus. The three-story, 13,000-square-foot center will house Information Technology (IT) resources crucial to genetics research and the Laboratory's mission of advancing human health.

The project was funded by just over $1 million in Maine bonds, leveraged with $2.5 million in non-state funding raised by the Laboratory. The ground floor of the building has been fitted out and occupied as of April 15; the upper two floors are planned as future IT offices in early 2009.

Jackson Chief Information Officer Scott McNeil describes the new data center as "a major improvement in the technology infrastructure of the Laboratory. It will support our strategic goal of building our bioinformatics and computational biology programs."

The new data center provides space for The Jackson Laboratory's information technology equipment, replacing an area in the Laboratory's oldest research building that could no longer meet the power and cooling demands of modern computer and storage hardware. According to Gregg TeHennepe, senior manager of systems administration for the Laboratory's Information Technology department, the new facility provides more than twice as much floor space, twice as much cooling capacity (expandable to four times as much), and three times the power (expandable to six times the power).

The Jackson Laboratory is a nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center based in Bar Harbor, Maine. Its mission is to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community.

Contact(s): Joyce Peterson, joyce.peterson@jax.org, 207-288-6058

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Office of Public Information
The Jackson Laboratory
600 Main Street
Bar Harbor, Maine 04609-1500
Phone: 207-288-6051
Fax: 207-288-6076
Email: news@jax.org