University of Virginia researchers, students and faculty will be experiencing multiple instances of downtime to a number of services that may happen through the first week of June, as the school's IT department migrates and brings online infrastructure in a newly constructed data center.

The new data center was built because the older facility was over capacity, according to a statement on the website of the university's IT department: "The University's existing Carruthers Hall data center is operating significantly beyond capacity with no practical alternatives for expansion in terms of generator-based power and cooling."

Complete service outages or reduced performance is expected for services like web mail, virtualized desktops, UNIX and website management and many more.

The new data center will effectively double the university's data center capacity. The 12,500-sq-ft building provides 5,500 sq ft of raised floor and about 1MW of critical power.

A 2.5MW generator was installed for power backup. The data center's designers implemented varying cooling zones for regular compute loads and for high-density research computing areas.

Construction of the new data center started in May 2010, and the site was ready for acceptance testing by January 2011.