The NIH Clinical Data Center (CDC) was activated 9/2009. The NIH CDC currently houses over 700 networked devices providing both the Clinical Center and other NIH Institute users' access to data and applications. Management and administration of the information technology systems in the CDC (excluding application administration) is provided by a staff of 6 employees providing 24X7 coverage and support.
The CDC was designed to minimize potential risk and maximize potential growth for the next 10 years. This design encompasses at least N+1 redundancy for the three major systems required for CDC operation (power, cooling and network). The design also focused on minimizing physical risk due to environmental issues, such as water intrusion due to aging building infrastructure and failures. It is projected that we should be able to double the number of systems of the current datacenter with the advent of new technologies such as server virtualization, blade technology, Storage Attached Network (SAN) devices and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices that utilize physical space efficiently.
