Agenda - 03-17-1998 - 9a - Laserfiche WebLink

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MEMORANDUM TO: Rod Visser, Assistant County Manager FROM: Roscoe Reeve, Land Records/GIS Director~_ RE: GIS Server and Work Stations DATE: March 6, 1998 Land Records/GIS has three UNIX workstations used for performing GIS work that were obtained in 1992. By the early Spring of 1997 they began to have trouble processing parcel updates to keep the new GIS maps current and accurate. The machines were evaluated by IBM and our GIS software vendor, ESRI, and they determined that all three machines were at over 96% capacity in both memory and disk. None of the three machines could be upgraded to add more memory or disk. Replacement workstations were requested for 1997-98 and were approved in the budget process. To take advantage of improvements in workstations, the plan was to obtain a server to store the massive data files associated with GIS maps and photo images, and two PC NT's which are low in cost but three times more powerful than the existing workstations. The money requested and approved was $48,000 but it was retained with the other automation funds pending review by the Information Technology Committee. In order for the old workstations to work at all (they were frequently freezing-up and work performed was being lost), a number of data files were removed and the map data was distributed over all three machines. Any significant data entered had to be matched by data being removed, and each procedure to enter or replace data took long periods of waiting on the part of staff. No single map of the County's updated parcels could be displayed on one machine. When one of the workstations would not function at all with the map maintenance application, a workstation was borrowed from the Assessor which had sufficient memory and disk to perform map updating well, and space was borrowed on the County's mainframe server to assemble the maps together when needed. Obtaining the new server and PC NT workstations will increase the efficiency and time- saved in doing map updates by 900%. It may eliminate the need to outsource all the parcel update backlog of Chapel Hill Township saving the County more than $20,000 because all workstations will be able to efficiently remove and replace data on the new server simultaneously. The proposed new server would be a UNIX IBM Risc6000 H50 with fast Ethernet connections, with either 512mb or lgb of memory, and over 12gb of disk. It will cost about $37,000. The two PC NT workstations will cost about $11,000 and will have 64mb of memory and 4.Sgb of disk. The old workstations will still be used to either process other GIS data or to serve as citizen query terminals (workstation that displays maps from the new server but stores no data internally) at the front of the Land Records/GIS office. Even the one abandoned existing workstation can be used as a query terminal and provides page-size maps for citizens by reading from one of the other workstations.