The action requested of City Council is to review and consider the approval of the emergency purchase of the attached proposal from Computers At Work Inc. The proposal is to purchase a replacement hardware storage management system. The proposal is estimated not to exceed $380,000.00 which includes new hardware, data transfer, vendor support and any additional material needed to implement the replacement system.

The Technology Solutions department was planning to replace the current Datrium storage system in fiscal year 23/24. We have an emergency need for replacing the Datrium system because of recent events of drive failures and product support ending late October 2023. The Datrium storage system is used to manage the storage of our servers both physical and virtual. Data storage is very critical to our organization because it impacts our everyday usage of data files and system applications that we rely on such as the CAD system used by police and fire. These failures of the Datrium storage impact our ability as a city to operate and provide service to city residents. The current storage management system Datrium was purchased in 2018 for $154,000. In July 2020 Datrium was purchased by VMware and a month later in August of 2020 announced to end of life effective immediately, with maximum support until October 31, 2023. For the past year that I have been Tech Solutions Director I have been conducting reviews of replacement systems talking to many of my peers and attending vendor product demos. After months of review, my decision was set to replace the Datrium system with the DELL VX-Rail storage platform.  The DELL Vx-Rail system is a modern solution that provides scalability for increasing data storage.