TO: Mayor Thomas J. Weisner
FROM: Kenneth Nelson, Police Technical Services Coordinator
DATE: September 21, 2013
SUBJECT: title
Resolution Authorizing the Purchase of Cisco computing and networking equipment for the Police Department in the amount of $231,072.45 from Sentinel Technologies, Inc.
body
PURPOSE:
This purchase includes two separate but related projects. The first project involves the annual replacement of one third of the Police Department's oldest server equipment. This was an approved 2013 decision package. The server replacement portion of this purchase request amounts to $174,357.75. This amount includes a 5% contingency for this portion of the project expenditure.
This new hardware will replace the current physical servers used to deploy a large number of virtualized servers for a variety of Police and Fire Department applications. New faster more capable server equipment is needed both for increased overall performance of the existing virtual systems and for the addition of new virtual servers coming on-line. This purchase also represents a change to a more consolidated architecture. This consolidates and/or reduces the amount of infrastructure needed to support the virtual servers in use, increases reliability and redundancy and streamlines the server deployment cycle.
The second project included in this purchase relates to the acquisition of Cisco networking equipment to enhance the Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) capabilities at the City's Disaster Recovery (DR) Site. The networking portion of this purchase request is for an amount of $56,714.70. This amount includes a 5% contingency. The bandwidth between the DR site and other City sites as well as the bandwidth between servers installed locally at the DR site will be greatly improved. In addition, this network equipment will enhance the redundancy and the reliability of the overall network connections at the DR site. This purchase is replacing Cisco networking equipment that was previously purchased and returned to Cisco for a credit.
BACKGROUND:
The Police Technical Services Division (PTSD) has been successfully deploying virtualized servers for a number of years now (since 2005) in an effort to speed up system and application deployments and better leverage hardware costs. The use of virtual servers has led to a great deal of success over these eight years with over 60 virtual servers deployed to date running on traditional rack mounted servers.
During the years that the Police Technical Services Division has deployed servers on a virtual platform, PTSD has often looked at the possibility of purchasing blade centers. In prior years, however, it was calculated that the benefits of blade centers to simplify deployment of the physical infrastructure was limited. Generally, the benefits were only realized on install, by reducing the amount of physical connections that needed to be made in order to provision servers. When evaluating blade servers in the past, it was also considered that they could simplify server management but that this activity and benefit was only modestly beneficial as it could be accomplished with good design and properly maintained documentation. The higher price of blades it was felt was not justifiable until recently.
One significant new development in the area of blade computing has led PTSD to reevaluate blade computing namely in the area of merged computing and networking systems. In the past four years, Cisco has released its Unified Computing System (UCS) platform for server deployments. The Cisco UCS platform unifies server computing, networking, management, virtualization, and storage access into a single integrated architecture. This unique combination of architectures enables end-to-end server visibility, management, and control in both bare metal (physical hardware) and virtual hardware environments.
The net result of this new server hardware platform is higher reliability with less management and greater flexibility. The benefits of Cisco UCS extend beyond traditional blade centers. Management of not only the CPU hardware but additionally the networking, and storage I/O is realized, which allows for an infrastructure design that ensures network failover end-to-end; providing faster failover and higher redundancy than what can be achieved otherwise.
Also realized is better consolidation and reduction of hardware infrastructure through use of Converged Network Adapters, Virtual Interface Cards, and the ability to migrate physical hardware profiles to other blades. These tools and capabilities allow for maximum use of the hardware on hand.
The additional networking equipment requested in this purchase for the City's Disaster Recovery will increase the WAN and LAN capacity and reliability to Fire Station 8. In addition to the quoted items, a 5% contingency amount is requested to accommodate any unforeseen parts and pieces. This purchase is being covered by a $49,000 Cisco credit return.
DISCUSSION:
It is intended that these devices will be purchased from Cisco, through Sentinel Technologies, Inc. Cisco has extended a discount level not available through other means to the City. Cisco has named Sentinel Technologies, Inc. as the preferred reseller of these products at this discount level for the City of Aurora.
Sufficient funds are available for this purchase in the 2013 budget in the following General fund accounts, 101-1233-419.38-07, 101-1233-419.38-26, 101-1233-419.38-11, 101-1233-419.64-10, 101-1233-419.64-11, 101-1233.419.64-12, 101-1233.419.64-80 as well as account 343-1233-419.73-87 (CIP Fund). A large number of accounts are represented here because the Cisco UCS platform is more than just a server replacement and the project incorporates all of these budgeted elements - maintenance for server, maintenance for networking equipment, server and network hardware, miscellaneous hardware and new software licensing. These budget accounts in past years would have been spent on separate individual purchases of these various elements.
IMPACT STATEMENT:
t is not anticipated that the approval of this professional service contract will have an impact on other City Departments.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Recommend the City purchase Cisco UCS and networking equipment from Sentinel Technologies, Inc. in the amount not to exceed $231,072.45.
cc: Alderman O'Connor, Chairman
Alderman Mervine
Alderman Peters, Alternate