Agenda - 12-05-2005-9c - Laserfiche WebLink

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Server Replacement Plan These existing County file servers range in age from 4 to 8 years, This is beyond the service expectancy far servers, and vendor support accordingly tends to be on a "best effort" basis. The potential for catastrophic failure of one or more of these servers is probable in the next year and remedy could take several days, during which time, mission critical data could be unavailable and service to the public disrupted. The County's Strategic Plan far technology calls for the timely and pro-active replacement of servers to ensure continuous availability of critical services and to ensure technology currency that is critical for the progress of automation, Server replacement funding has been a critical component of the approved 2005/06 CIP. Reliability The continuous availability of data throughout the County has become a critical need. Across the County, the overall availability of data is measured at 99.4%, As the current servers get older and less reliable, this number is declining, Outages in the County's current server infrastructure can render data unavailable in a range of time from several minutes in minor cases to a week or mare in cases of catastrophic failure. For example, in December of 2004, the 7 year-old server used for Permitting, Inspections, Animal Shelter management and Animal Control failed catastrophically, It took approximately 40 hours to restore access to the data on a new server. During that time, Permitting, Inspections and Animal services were unable to access historical data, enter new data or track daily operations, This disruption took several days after the repair to fully recover from. It should be noted that this recovery time was atypically brief. Conversely, Storage Area Networks have impressive availability figures, Properly configured Storage Area Networks boast uptime figures of 99,99% and better, This level of availability ensures that County operations continue with minimal interruptions and data is continually accessible to ensure services are delivered efficiently. Further, if application servers that use the Storage Area Networks catastrophically fail, the rebuild time for a new server can be reduced to less than an hour, Archival The County has been archiving data to tape storage for several years now. This archival process ensures Orange County can recover from myriad disasters as well as ensure accidentally erased data can be recovered, The current technology to archive data is strained by the amount of data growth over the years, The nightly process of archiving data is barely completing in time for resumption of normal office hours at 8:00 a,m, As the County provides more services during the night hours, the ability to archive data non-intrusively become compromised with existing technology. Currently, archival success rates using the County's current technologies are averaging an 89% success rate (this does not imply that any data is lost, merely that on any given night, 11 % of data may not have been adequately backed up and an earlier backup tape would have to be used in the event of catastrophic failure). Considering that County data is an irreplaceable public asset, the need to adopt a solution with inherently better retention rates is acute. A Storage Area Network allows for quick archiving of data locally, which can periodically be transferred to tape (without affecting citizen services) for storage offsite, Success rates far Storage Area Network archival technology exceed 99% in the field.