School Board to move into its new data center

GONZALES — The Ascension Parish School Board will open its new data center next week.

The new center, at 1707 Purpera Ave., will house the school district’s technology department, including the six racks for 140 servers that store all of the district’s electronic information. A ribbon-cutting ceremony has been scheduled for 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Jake Ragusa, the head of the school district’s technology department, said the new building will be the home for the department’s nine employees. The building has work stations for the employees, a conference room that eventually will be equipped with wireless technology and a separate room for the servers and related equipment.

The new data center replaces the one housed in the old Donaldsonville High School, a building that was constructed in 1906 and has struggled to handle the sophisticated servers used by the district office.

“Keeping it cool is quite the adventure,” Ragusa said.

In fact, during the hot summer months, he said, it’s basically impossible to keep the temperature cool enough. The new building features two cooling units that each can handle the job by itself.

Moving the data center from Donaldsonville to Gonzales also is expected to bring more stability to Donaldsonville’s electrical grid, which wasn’t designed to handle the modern technology being used by the school district, Ragusa said.

The cost for the building was approximately $520,000, Ragusa said, and the entire cost for the project was around $600,000.