Artist's rendering of the exterior of the University of Hawai'i Information Technology Center, expected to be completed May 2013.
By Staff Reports
(Honolulu)– The University of Hawai‘i held a groundbreaking ceremony for the new UH Information Technology Center, a six-story building on the UH Mānoa campus that will provide a centralized facility for the university’s systemwide Information Technology Services (ITS) division and house the university’s enterprise information and communications technology systems.
Governor Neil Abercrombie, UH President M.R.C. Greenwood and UH Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer David Lassner spoke at the ceremony, which was attended by UH Board of Regents members, UH administrators, government officials and building partner representatives.
“The UH Information Technology Center represents a timely on-campus upgrade that will help reshape the way we teach, research and communicate, in situations ranging from day-to-day to times of crisis,” said Governor Abercrombie. “The project unites several of my administration’s priorities, investing in people and new technology, while doing so smartly with efficient and energy-saving systems. The UH IT Center is a necessary step for our university to continue to compete on a national and global stage.”
The new six-story, 74,000-square-foot Information Technology Center will house a state-of-the-art and energy-efficient data center featuring an 8,000-square-foot machine room for enterprise servers, storage and communications.
The facility will also be the home of the university’s first emergency situation room, which will provide space with available power and communications suitable for UH administrators and emergency personnel to manage disasters and other crisis situations.
“This center will provide the foundation for our mission-focused efforts and move us a giant step forward in our quest to be a model 21st-century university with excellent facilities,” said Greenwood. “The University of Hawai‘i learned many lessons from the 2004 flood that caused extensive damage to the Mānoa campus and threatened our main data center, which provides critical resources for all UH campuses and Hawai‘i state government offices. Those lessons, along with our goal to provide a quality learning and research environment for our students, faculty and staff, have inspired this building.”
The center will also include meeting and training rooms, the university’s Help Desk, modern workspace for ITS staff, facilities for faculty to develop and produce engaging digital media content for education and research, and advanced teleconferencing and collaboration environments for members of the UH community to work with colleagues and peers around the world.
The building will be designed to support LEED certification, which is rare for a building with a data center. Sustainable green design strategies will include energy-efficient building orientation, daylighting strategies including horizontal light shelves, displacement ventilation to reduce energy consumption, a water catchment system, vegetated roofs and lanais to mitigate storm drainage, healthy indoor air quality, systems commissioning, conservations of resources and recycling.
“By consolidating our IT systems, which are currently scattered throughout various buildings on campus, into one facility specifically designed to support these systems in an efficient manner, we will achieve substantial gains in energy efficiency for IT,” said Lassner. “We’ve imagined a building like this for our university for many years and we’re excited to see it becoming a reality.”
Building partners on the project include Ferraro Choi and Associates, Ltd., as project architect, dck pacific construction as general contractor and Bowers + Kubota Consulting as construction manager.
For more information about the Information Technology Center including regular construction updates, visit www.hawaii.edu/itcenter.