Report to Mayor and City Council
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Consent
SUBJECT:
Title
CONSIDERATION OF APPROVAL OF CONTRACT SERVICES AGREEMENT WITH LANAIR FOR SERVER UPGRADE AND SOFTWARE CONSOLIDATION (CITY COUNCIL)
Body
I. SUMMARY
The City of Carson’s Information Technology (I.T.) Department has three antiquated, closely approaching end-of-life, virtual environments located at two locations (City Hall and the City Yard). The Server upgrade will provide a more centralized and all-in-one integrated systems solution that would be more cost effective to maintain (30k annual savings). The new Server will also provide required security controls, increased critically needed disk space and quick scalability when needed for future growth.
II. RECOMMENDATION
Recommendation
TAKE the following actions:
1. WAIVE the bidding requirements in Chapter 6 (“Purchasing System”) of Title II of the Carson Municipal Code, pursuant to Carson Municipal Code Section 2611(g) (“Cooperative Purchasing”); and
2. APPROVE the contract services agreement with Lanair, for server upgrade and software consolidation services in the amount of $91,848.18 (“Agreement”); and
3. AUTHORIZE the Mayor to execute the Agreement upon approval as to form by the City Attorney.
1.
Body
III. ALTERNATIVES
None.
IV. BACKGROUND
The City of Carson currently utilizes three (3) virtual environments to run business services: Two at the City Hall and one at the Yard. The ERP virtual environment hosts Tyler Munis while the PROD virtual environment hosts 50+ business critical services (Email, File, Print, RecPro, Intranet, Web, etc.). Both environments share disk space. The third virtual environment, located at the Yard, contains file, print, AD, Fueling, and CalSense Water system applications.
Challenges & Impact to Business:
• Critically Low on Shared Disk Space. Both the ERP & PROD virtual environments are running critically low on disk space and will start shutting down services (Email, Tyler, File Server, etc.) once the disk space reaches capacity. This has already happened this month and is estimated it will happen again in less than 30-40 days. To add additional space will cost roughly $15-17k not including additional fees for annual maintenance.
• Expensive to maintain multiple environments. Supporting multiple virtual environments costs close to $29k annually.
• Hardware almost End-of-Life: Most of the hardware utilized by the virtual environments are close to becoming End-of-Life (with some already expired) and will no longer be supported by its manufacturer. The hardware will have to be replaced this year at a cost of around 55k; not including ongoing annual support contracts estimated at 30k.
• Difficult to Support: Because there are multiple virtual environments to support, maintaining standardized support is difficult as well as a lot of time spent trying to work through security patches and compatibility issues with other software systems.
Proposed Solution & Benefits:
Recommendations for a cost effective, low maintenance integrated solution came from various local cities (Pasadena, Manhattan, & Long Beach) as well as from the University of Dominquez Hills. All recommended an integrated solution like a Nutanix device which they have all switched over to in the past few years. The low cost single piece of hardware is integrated with a network switch, hard drive, and 4 servers which can be expanded to an operation 2-3 times our current size (future proof!). It is easy to maintain and contains its own virtual software.
The proposed solution is to consolidate the City of Carson’s multiple virtual environments into an all-in-one integrated solution with ability to easily scale with the City’s needs over the next 5 years. We would replace the current virtual software (VMWare) with the onboard vendor provided virtual software to eliminate future maintenance and license fees of close to 30k. Finally, because of the integrated system’s resilient Disaster Recovery capabilities, we are able to configure a ‘fail-over’ audio/video environment for the critical software in the Council Chambers, allowing us to quickly failover in the event of an unplanned system outage as well as utilize PEG funding for the project.
Benefits:
Lower overall operating cost - Proposed solution will save the City an annual support cost of $66,450 over 3 years compared to current maintenance costs.
Current Annual Support Cost: $28,877
Proposed Annual Support Cost: $6,727
Annual Savings: $22,150
Scalable Disk Space - Can add additional drive space (up to 12TB) on the fly.
Long Hardware Life - Hardware and Software set to go end of life in 5-7+ years.
Easy to Maintain - Integrated unit has been rigorously tested to ensure compatibility with all internal HW & SW components. Patches are easy to apply as well as hardware upgrades and is one of the strengths of this product. Minimal training needed for staff.
Implementation & Cost
Hardware $53,388.75
Software $6,405.00
Shipping $900.00
Tax $5,071.93
3 Year Systems Support $20,182.50
Professional Services $5,900.00
$91,848.18
Estimated Completion Time: 1 Day
No Downtime Expected as all work to be completed in off hours.
Description of work:
1. Mount new hardware and test.
2. Configure new hardware with appropriate resources.
3. Configure integrated virtual environment.
4. Configure network for new hardware.
5. Move servers over to new environment.
6. Test new environment.
7. Decommission previous environments.
V. FISCAL IMPACT
Funds will be allocated from the PEG account budget for FY 2019/20 in the amount of $91,848.18 from account number 247-50-520-101-8003.
VI. EXHIBITS
1. Lanair Contract Agreement. (pgs. 4 - 35)
2. Lanair Quotation No. 020946 v1. (pgs. 36 - 42).
Prepared by: Kevin Kennedy, Information Technology Manager