Physical hosting of IT servers

You can host your servers in the Grenoble data center for Higher Education and Research. Grenoble data center is managed by a technical committee responsible for infrastructure management and development. The technical committee has several objectives:

• Pool hosting to achieve economies of scale
• Provide a secure environment for all your data and its processing
• Reduce the environmental footprint of your servers by optimizing their hosting energy consumption

Rooms at the Grenoble data center

The Grenoble data center is part of the regional initiative “Convergence des Infrastructures Numériques en Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes”. CINAURA offers a full range of hosting services, from physical servers to applications and data, for institutions in the region, as well as for major research and educational projects of national or European scope. The Grenoble data center is designed to meet the server hosting needs of the Grenoble-Alpes university site and beyond.

The data center currently comprises 5 rooms located in the Grenoble area.

• The IMAG room on the Saint-Martin d’Hères university campus (2016)
• The GreEn-Er room on Grenoble’s scientific peninsula (2015)
• The GRICAD room specifically for high-density HPC/AI (2025)
• Two other rooms on the Saint-Martin d’Hères university campus.

LBoth IMAG and GreEn-ER rooms have been designed with a high level of security in mind, with particular attention to energy efficiency. Thanks to the work carried out by the data center technical committee, in 2020 they signed up to the European Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centers with the European Union’s Joint Research Center. Find out more about the Code of Conduct.

The GRICAD room features 100kW per rack, cooled directly by hot water. A highly efficient solution for HPC and AI resources.

A project for a new GR3@ room is planned to open in the next few years, replacing the “old generation” rooms and expanding our range of eco-responsible accommodation.

Services on offer

Hosting

With the development of a rich catalogue of services at different levels, the hosting of physical servers should be reserved for cases that do not fit into this framework. System virtualisation, shared storage and intensive computing platforms can address most ‘standard’ needs. The pooling they offer aims to optimise the use of resources, which helps to reduce the digital footprint. This includes the space required in the data center. Whatever your funding, there are ways for you to participate in these alternatives. Contact us before you plan to buy equipments.

Our priority area is Higher Education and Research on the Grenoble-Alpes university site. This involves the UGA and its constituent parts, as well as the national research organisations present on the site. The Savoie university site with the USMB is also a partner. This hosting is subject to the approval and signature of a charter and may require a convention depending on your authority and the room. The Datacenter’s technical committee will decide where to host your equipment, depending on the space available and the specifics of your request.

Installation support

You’re not alone, our teams are there to help you set up your servers, to explain the security rules to follow and the instructions for installing equipment, connecting to the network and obtaining physical access.

Supervision and monitoring

By supervising and monitoring the power supply, cooling, infrastructure and physical access to the rooms, we offer you a secure environment for your equipment. The IMAG and GreEn-ER rooms benefit from a dedicated 24/7 on-site maintainer.

Data center Network: SPRING

The aim of the SPRING project is to design, deploy and operate, with the help of a technical committee, a shared SDN infrastructure for the Grenoble Alpes University data center. It serves as the base for a number of projects, including Winter, Ciment and Summer, and hosts servers for a wide range of laboratories, UFRs and central services. If you would like to host a physical or virtual machine in the Grenoble Alpes University data center and require a network and security service, or if you would simply like information about our activities, you can contact them at spring-contact@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr.

Prices

For members of the great establishment UGA, the cost of the accommodation infrastructure in the rooms is covered by their establishment. You will have to pay for your own electricity consumption and ancillary services, unless your institution pays for them. As part of the UGA’s digital strategy, the university has decided to cover the cost of electricity consumption for its hosted entities. You will find the rates for the various services here.

Procedure for requesting accommodation

For an initial request, please contact us directly by e-mail at the following address contact-datacenter@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr. This will enable us to identify the context of your hosting and to specify the conditions of access to the offer we can provide. This is an opportunity to check the relevance of physical equipment in relation to higher-level system virtualisation, shared storage or intensive computing services. Physical hosting should be reserved for special cases where these services cannot meet your needs. Each hosting request involves filling in an online form, one request for each hardware item. The data center technical committee will get back to you as soon as possible.