Exploring the sustainability life cycle of enterprise computers in higher education

Enterprise computing services play a critical role in universities enabling faculty, students, and staff to complete meaningful work and further goals of the institution. These services require physical server computers with processors, disk space, and memory. Physical servers take up data center space and consume power; they are designed for performance with little detail paid to ecological design. In an effort to reduce hardware and maintenance costs, a trend to virtualize these servers exists, which would also free up physical space and save energy. This exploratory case study explored the current sustainable computing trends at a large university in the Midwest as well as whether practices of virtualizing enterprise server computers were economically, socially, and ecologically sustainable. Finally, this study investigated how these practices were planned, monitored, and evaluated. Findings indicate virtualizing enterprise servers in the Intelligent Infrastructure is economically, socially, and environmentally sustainability. Recommendations for university leadership were developed as a result of data gathering and analysis from participant interviews, correspondence, observations and artifacts. Maximizing utility and outreach were the two dominant related themes present in the data sources.