R97-154 ACCEPTING THE BID - Laserfiche WebLink

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' r Management Information Systems Division " ' ' Memo No. 97-05 Page 2 current mainframe is not Year 2000 compliant; it operates only with a 2-digit year field and cannot I be upgraded to handle the millennium. (All other computer hardware systems and software systems ' developed in-house since 1994 are Year 2000 compliant. Vendors of all commercially developed , software systems in use by the city either warrant their Year 2000 compliance or are in the process of upgrading their products in time for the millennium.) In addition to the Year 2000 problem, there are economic factors which also compel replacement of the mainframe at this time. The cunent system requires leased operating system software, available only from IBM, which costs the City $1987 per month. The large, complex, and aging suite of hardware systems which comprise the mainframe requires a maintenance contract which costs the City an additional $1828 per month. And, while we are unable to isolate exact charges, the prodigious cooling and power consumption requirements of the system add significantly to the utility expenses of the Civic Center, which are underwritten by the City. The recommended P/390 system purchase provides a rather elegant solution to these problems. The P/390 is essentially a PC server, to which is added a satellite central processor unit which provides mainframe processing power equivalent to, and in some respects superior to, our current mainframe system. The system takes advantage of new Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor processor, rather than the bipolax technology of older systems. This technology permits extreme miniaturization, vastly reduced power and cooling requirements, and a much lower manufacturing price. The system is specifically engineered to be Year 2000 compliant and to use IBM's newest generation of operating system software, also Year 2000 compliant. Because of the reduced scale of the processor(and also because of competition from client-server hardware and software systems) we are able to purchase the operating system softwaxe (previously leased for nearly $24,000 per year, every year) for approximately $21,000, one-time charge. The hardware is sold with a three-year on-site warranty, reducing the current$21,936 annual maintenance charge to less than $3200, an annual savings of$18,816). With a system purchase price of$85,480, the payback for this purchase is less than two years, while the minimum expected life of the system is five years. As a partial benchmark of this recommended course of action, City of Decatur MIS and Financial Management staff visited the City of Champaign to examine their new Finance hardware and software system solutions. Relying on commercially provided software and a distributed processing environment, Champaign invested last year a grand total of$1,445,360 and will pay an additional $61,000 annually for software licensing. Their degree of satisfaction with the system, especially with the responsiveness of the vendor in responding to software problems, is considerably lower than experienced here. Overall, we expect the new system to cost 80% less than the old system, to use one-tenth the electrical power, and, in terms of raw processing power, to run three times faster. It will also free valuable floor space for other equipment. More importantly, it will allow us to begin Year 2000 conversion of our legacy application software systems in sufficient time to prevent any millennium-related problems. Most importantly, it will allow us to retain our critical Financial Management processing functions highly responsive to the evolving needs of our users, in the most secure and disaster-proof of data processing environments currently available, the IBM mainframe environment. MIS staff will be available at the October 20, 1997 Council Meeting to respond to any questions you may have.