Orange County NC Website
Browse       Search
36 <br />Virtual Server Hosting Shelves and Physical Servers: <br />The County should continue to invest in the consolidation and virtualization of its server environment, <br />which requires additional virtual server hosting shelves and replacement of physical servers. In server <br />virtualization efforts, many small physical servers are replaced by one larger physical server, to <br />increase the utilization of costly hardware resources such as CPUs. Server Virtualization allows for a <br />reduction in the total number of servers. As a general rule, one virtualized server can replace up to <br />ten servers. By enhancing its virtual server environment, Orange County can improve its total cost of <br />server ownership through reduced hardware maintenance costs, and reduced energy costs. In <br />addition, the movement to a virtual environment is essential for disaster recovery. <br />Storage Area Network Expansion: <br />As governments continue to collect data and information at an exponential rate, and subsequently <br />store that data within the information systems, computing resources become strained. Orange <br />County should invest in a Storage Area Network (SAN) expansion in order to house the data off the <br />main technology resources, thereby extending their usefulness and reducing future expansion costs. <br />Upgrade and Standardization of Microsoft Software: <br />As the County continues to invest in technology to gain efficiencies, increase effectiveness, and <br />enhance transparency and accountability, standardization becomes more critical. Stand -alone <br />systems are still being used across Orange County departments, limiting the utility and cross - <br />functionality of data sharing and importation between business units. The first area of <br />standardization should be concentrated on the MS Office Suite and Operating Systems. By moving to <br />a County -wide standardized platform, there will be substantial increases in speed of deployment of <br />systems, speed of upgrades, continuity between departmental offerings, and responsiveness of the IT <br />department to customer needs. The County has two options related to upgrading the Microsoft <br />environment. Option One is to procure the Microsoft Enterprise Licensing Agreement, which will <br />allow the County to remain current with respect to Microsoft versions. This option is more costly than <br />the County's previous model of upgrading only as needed. The second option is to upgrade all County <br />devices to the current version of Microsoft by procuring individual licenses for each machine. This is a <br />more cost - effective option but it does not ensure that the County will stay up -to -date on its Microsoft <br />offerings. <br />34 <br />