HomeMy WebLinkAbout9 Purchase for ITenda Item a
To: Board of Directors
From: Ian Fitzgerald
Date. October 04, 2017
Subject: Consideration to Purchase Replacement Information Technology
Infrastructure
1. WHY THIS MATTER IS BEFORE THE BOARD
Board approval is required for expenditures in excess of $15,000.
2. HISTORY
Sometimes referred to as the technological life of an asset, the useful life reflects how
long the equipment can be used before the product becomes functionally obsolete -
that is, when the risk associated with the product becomes too great, or when the
operational costs make a transition to a new product an economic advantage.
Unanticipated changes to the operating environment can affect the equipment's useful
life. In the last 5 years, three significant expansions to the District's business has put
increased storage and compute demands on the server environment; Water AMI &
Hour to 1-Hour readings, Electric AMI, and Video Security, have all negatively affected
the anticipated useful life of the District's servers.
In addition to increase server requirements by new business initiatives, there are four
primary factors that determine a product's useful life in an enterprise network: Market
Innovation, Vendor end -of --life Policies, Operating Life, and Operating Cost.
With Market Innovation, the relative stability of a product is key for determining useful
lifeI In the District's case, we are unable to install any version of VMWare past the 5.x
versions due to incompatible hardware. Unable to upgrade the critical software which
manages all the District's servers and desktops; security vulnerabilities are exposed,
reliability fixes are missed, and enhanced functionality is not available. The District is
also wanting to add Virtual GPU to the environment; a technology that will allow for
better performance of engineering software such as AutoCAD and GIS. Existing blade
infrastructure; however, does not support this technology, and adding VGPU would
require an upgrade of existing blade technology at a minimum.
Vendor end -of --life announcements trigger a series of events that lead to the end of
support for a product. As of August 2017, the 6 blade hardware used to house all
District servers, are considered by Cisco as end -of -life. This essentially means, if the
hardware fails, they will no longer be replaced at no cost under our existing support
and maintenance contract. blade hardware costs $30,000-$40,000 a piece. v
The storage is also coming to an end -of -life in 2018, with the same ramifications.
The Operating Life affects useful life and is beginning to show on the existing servers.
In the past 18 months, 2 of the District's blade hardware have failed, requiring full
replacement. The District has 6 other blades that have not failed, however, indicators
point to a higher probability this may happen within the next year. If this happens,
outside the support agreement, replacement costs will be required.
Operating Casts are the final consideration when determining useful life. The price of
server and storage equipment has reduced significantly, while providing more
compute and storage. Compute and storage systems have also migrated into new
Hyper -Converge technology, creating faster setup times, easier management, and
quicker trouble -shooting; all leading to less labor to manage the same storage
infrastructure.
All the indicators are present that it is time to upgrade the District's server technology,
both at the main data center, and at the disaster recovery center.
3. NEW INF®RM�4T1®N
The growing demands of District's enterprise applications and the fast pace of the
business, threaten to put legacy server design with separate storage, storage
networks and servers at risk of failure. The silos created by traditional data center
infrastructure present barriers for change and progress, adding complexity to every
step from ordering, deployment, and management.
Nutanix's Hyper -converged infrastructure streamlines the deployment, management
and scaling of datacenter resources by combining x86-based server and storage
resources with intelligent software in a software defined solution. Separate servers,
storage networks and storage arrays can are replaced with a single hyper -converged
solution to create an agile datacenter that easily scales and migrates with the
District's business.
As seen in the below table, the cost to go to a simpler, more robust server solution, is
17% cheaper that the original server cost, and yet provides a 240% more computer
power and 540% increase in storage.
Technology
Existing Server
Nutanix Server
Increase/Decrease
Cost Storage (TB)
($)
51%,42 38
432,400 208.6
549 %
9
Memory (GB)
1152
Processors
112
268
239 %
Section 3.08.060 of the District's
code (Joint Purchasing with the State of California
and other public agencies) permits the District to take advantage of other agencies
low bids providing that competitive procurement procedures were followed. The costs
proposals are submitted on the National IPA (NIPA), which adheres to this section of
the District code.
Proposal put forth by CDW-Government
CDW-Government has put together a National IPA (NIPA) quote that will handle all
the District's server requirements for the next 5-7 years. This design will reduce
management, provide disaster recovery and failover redundancy, and use future
scalability and growth as new IT projects come on board.
NIPA Contract
1. Primary Site - $240,104
2. Secondary Site - $178,467
3. Professional Services - $32,425
Total Contract - $450,997
Due to the large additional compute and storage rep
Replacement project, the server costs will be brc
projects: Network Infrastructure Improvements (60%),
Project (40%).
uirements by the Electric Meter
<en between two main capital
and Electric Meter Replacement
The planned funding source is the Electric Department General Fund.
5. RECOMMENDATION
Authorize the General Manager to execute a purchase agreement with Nutanix, through
CDW-Government, for the new server technology in an amount not to exceed $450,997
plus a 10% contingency of $45,100, for an amount not to exceed $496,097 plus sales tax.
Stephen Hollabaugh Michael D. Holley
Assistant General Manager General Manager