The green movement is transforming the IT landscape — and creating a new set of challenges for project managers, who must balance hard ROI choices, fuzzy metrics and assorted expectations. When it comes to cutting energy costs and delivering long-term sustainability, the blueprint for green projects isn’t black and white. But best practices are emerging.
Rapid expansion of Bryant University’s campus in Rhode Island created serious IT challenges. Between 1997 and 2007, it added 144,000 square feet of new facilities and experienced a 300 percent rise in applications. Although these extensions were a boon to students and faculty, the IT infrastructure was decentralized, inefficient, costly and unable to scale to growing demand. The university sought help to update the sprawling, high-energy consuming IT system. John Guimond, an executive project manager for IBM Global Services, led Bryant’s effort to build a new “green” data center and virtualize existing servers.
Fortunately, this was not the first project of its kind for Guimond. In recent years, he has participated in many IT projects with “a green technology slant,” especially involving cooling and power. IBM helped Bryant University virtualize its 75 servers to 40, cutting floorspace by 40-50 percent while reducing power consumption and cooling requirements.