Redwood City/Midpoint Technology Park Expansion Project
January 10, 2006
January Project Update
The initial budget for the building renovations to 510 Broadway was floated within the department of Land and Buildings over the past couple of weeks, and caused much consternation and e-mails with subject lines containing lots of capital letters and exclaimation points. Due to the rising costs of raw materials and costs for extensive structural work on the building, the initial proposed budget was significantly higher than expected. As a result, we've had to make a few changes to the proposed layout of the building.
Only half of the machine room will be furnished with cabinets for servers and cabled for move-in day. This will not affect the services move team, as our initial move-in footprint will fill less than half of even the reduced layout.
Showers originally planned for the first floor will not be installed. There will still be showers available in the health club on-site.
All second-floor (i.e., office space) improvements have been split out, to be considered separately.
One of the major problems facing the Services Move project before the winter break not having a solid understanding of what our business and technical goals were. Since then, we've been working on significantly revamping the charter to encompass the shared goals for Redwood City of IT Services, Administrative Systems, and Business Affairs as a whole. Over the next week, I'm hoping to get signoff on the charter from Bill Clebsch, Bob O'Leary, and Randy Livingston. The new charter talks about the data center capacity concerns for Forysthe and Sweet Halls, as well as pressure caused by the General Use Permit with Santa Clara County for office space on campus. With a shared understanding of why we're working on the Redwood City projects and a common set of goals, we'll be able to make real progress towards determining which systems and services make the most sense in Redwood City, in Forsythe, or elsewhere on-campus.
The services move team is also working to pull together the remaining loose ends in our initial budget work. Between the budget and charter work, we've got most of the background materials needed to hire a consulting firm to help us make final decisions on which services should move to a new data center, which services should maintain a presence both on- and off-campus, and help us prepare a set of options for what our initial presence in a new data center would look like, along with the costs and benefits of each option.
Over the next month or so, we're hoping to get the charter finalized, make contact with several consulting agencies that have worked with other educational institutions, and choose one of them to work with us on the services move. The construction project will finalize their budget proposal and present to the Board of Trustees in February, and we'll start on the schematic design (in-depth architecture and construction planning) phase of the building renovations.
Also, please encourage anybody who is interested in the RWC projects to sign up for rwc-partners@lists. All RWC project announcements and updates will be sent there.
