This purchase is to provide the necessary replacement infrastructure for both physical and virtual servers in the City Hall data center.  As the City's oldest operating servers have reached their useful life and need replacement, the IT department looked to deliver increased reliability and data protection at a reasonable price.  Staff evaluated options for replacing the existing network servers, which will be phased in over a 7-year period.  This included a review of the option to maintain the existing structure by replacing the physical servers, a new storage area network, and a migration of our virtual servers to a traditional three-tier virtualized VMWare architecture.

Staff evaluated the costs associated with a Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), which delivers a full infrastructure stack that integrates computers, virtualization, storage, networking and security to power any application, at any scale. Nutanix is the industry leader in this type of technology infrastructure.  In evaluating the costs over a seven-year period, Nutanix came out comparable to the purchase of traditional replacement hardware and virtual servers.  Pairing the similar cost of replacement to the added benefits of Gartner's leading Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Nutanix was the clear choice for the City of Allen's long-term virtualized server and storage environment.

For Allen, moving to a Hyperconverged Infrastructure will reap benefits through simpler system administration, faster system deployments and upgrades, vastly improved reliability and high availability, and improved performance all at a cost similar to traditional, more complex virtual server environments.  This new platform has been adopted by organizations around the world, including several local cities, to provide the high availability organizations and citizens have come to expect.  The same kind of technology is what underlies public clouds such as Microsoft's Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Nutanix platform continues the organization's push to simplify IT while making it more fault tolerant and fast to expand as our needs grow.  This investment will result in a migration of approximately 40 servers into a 5-node cluster, shrinking the physical footprint and reducing power and cooling requirements resulting in greener operations for the data center.

Through an approximate seven-year phased-in Nutanix HCI implementation additional costs associated with the expansion of Nutanix HCI system will be recommended as future, existing servers will be phased out of service. Existing servers will be redeployed and reused as "back-up" servers.

The costs associated with this item has been budgeted in the IT Replacement Fund.  By receiving pricing negotiated through BuyBoard, the City of Allen ensures that the equipment has been competitively procured.  BuyBoard was created to leverage the cooperative buying power of local governments and school districts in Texas and ensure the best prices for equipment and services.

Local Government Code, Chapter 271.102, authorizes a local government to participate in a cooperative purchasing program with another local government or a local cooperative organization. The Texas Local Government Code permits cooperative agreements between local governments for the purchase of goods and services and satisfies the requirement of local governments to seek competitive bids for purchase of such goods and services through supplier contracts.

I make a motion authorizing the City Manager to Purchase Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the data center from EST Group through BuyBoard for an amount of $249,491.