R97-154 ACCEPTING THE BID - Laserfiche WebLink

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MANAGEMENT SERVICES DEPARTMENT MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SERVICES DIVISION MEMORANDUM NO.97-05 October 7, 1997 MEMORANDUM FOR: Honorable Mayor and City Council FROM: James L.Williams, Jr., City Manager Rolanda A. Johnson,Assistant City Manager David S. Johnston,Manager, MIS Division�-'� SUBJECT: Purchase of IBM 5erver S/390 Purchasing Division Memorandum 97-43, provided to you elsewhere in this packet, details the vendor selection recommendation for the purchase of an IBM Server S/390 computer system. This memo is provided to furnish you with background information on the rationale for, and economics of, this purchase. For much of its history in the computing age, the City of Decatur's data processing environment has been a highly centralized one, relying principally on a single mainframe computer to which all users connected via terminals. The mainframe computer currently in use is an IBM 9377 Mode190, a large-scale, air-cooled system which was installed in 1987, at a cost of approximately $700,000 for hardware and required system software. Originally purchased with a life expectancy of 5 years, the system life expectancy was extended to 7 years by selective equipment upgrades. Since 1993, the City has pursued a strategy to move from the highly centralized computing environment to a distributed environment, in which a growing proportion of the processing load is shifted to departmental processors. Hence the purchase in 1996 of a midrange computer, an IBM AS/400, located at the Law Enforcement Center, to support Police and Fire Dispatching and Record functions. In addition, departmental servers (essentially powerful personal computers connected by a network) are installed at Fire Headquarters, Municipal Services Center, Water Production, Vehicle Maintenance, Mass Transit, and Police Headquarters. These, along with application and file servers in the Civic Center, now carry much of the load previously carried by the mainframe. The functions which still remain on the mainframe are those which are inappropriate for de-centralized processing: the central Financial Management activities of the City, which for security and accountability reasons must remain in a highly centralized mode. In addition to its extreme age, there are a number of other factors which compel us to replace the existing mainframe at this time. The most pressing of these is the much-publicized Year 2000 problem: the inability of much existing hardware, operating system software, and application system software to appropriately handle the impending change from the 20th to the 21 st century. The roots of this problem stem from the early days of computing, when computer memory and storage capacity were e�remely limited and expensive. In order to conserve resources, it became standard practice in the industry to store all date data in a format that used only the last two digits of the year (e.g., 1997 is stored as 97). While practicable for many years, this convention fails when the millennium changes, as the year 2000 (stored as 00)will be interpreted as the year 1900. The problem extends throughout the data processing industry and estimates to fix it range from billions to hundreds of billions of dollars (upwards of$30 billion for the US federal government alone). Our