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HomeMy WebLinkAbout12/11/07 Technologies December 11, 2007 MINUTES OF THE REGULAR MEETING OF THE TECHNOLOGIES BOARD HELD ON December 11,2007 The Regular Session of the TECHNOLOGIES BOARD of The Colony, Texas was called to order at 6:30 pm on the 11 th of December, 2007 at CITY HALL, in the City Manager's Conference Room, City Hall, 6800 MAIN STREET, THE COLONY, TEXAS, with the following Technologies Board members present: John Harton Harshkumar Desai Mark Porter Chad Joyce Jack Turner With 5 out of five members present a quorum was established and the following items were discussed. 11.0 I Call Meeting to Order: 6:26 P.M. 12.0 I DISPOSITION OF MINUTES Acceptance of Technologies Board Minutes for a meeting held on August 14,2006. [3.0 I CITIZEN INPUT None I 4.0 I AGENDA ITEMS 4.1 Discuss and consider a recommendation for the purchase of two 64 Bit blades with VMware for the IBM blade center. 4.3 Discuss and consider a recommendation for the purchase of VMware Virtual Center. Bruce Maker introduced himself as the New IT Manager. Item 4.1 was discussed in conjunction with item 4.3. Mr. Maker explained that we want to purchase the blades to upgrade servers that are out of warranty and at the end of their life expectancy. Mr. Joyce asked what city services will be on the on the new server. Mr. Maker responded that we will be replacing existing city servers and moving those databases over. Mr. Harton asked if we would be upgrading to SQL server 2005. Mr. Maker responded that we would not be doing that at this time because some of the applications we are running are not set up for it at this time. Some of those applications might be upgraded in the coming year at which time we will look at upgrading. The VMware will allow for multiple servers on one blade. Mr. Harton asked if Mr. Maker was looking at the 64 bit blades for any particular reason. Mr. Maker responded that we want to go with the 64 bit because of processing power and that Exchange 2007 requires them. Mr. Harton asked if we were going to look at HP blades, Mr. Maker stated that we already have an IBM chassis and HP cards will not work in it. Mr. Maker stated that the Virtual Center will allow them to do maintenance without taking the entire city down by moving systems from one blade to another. Mr. Joyce I December 1 I, 2007 recommended that we look into going with a truly distributed system to cut costs. Mr. Maker responded that we do not have the infrastructure at this time and possibly two to three years down the road we might be able to do that. 4.2 Discuss and consider a recommendation for the purchase of IBM Blade Center switches. Mr. Maker explained that we currently have two switches in the Blade Center. We would like to purchase two more for redundancy. Right now if one should go down we would have to wait until it was repaired and users would be affected. If we purchased these we would have something to use while the other one is being repaired. 4.4 Discuss and consider a recommendation for the purchase of Cisco PIX Firewall. 4.5 Discuss and consider a recommendation for the purchase of Cisco 3560 switches for remote locations. Item 4.4 was discussed in conjunction with item 4.5. Mr. Maker explained that our current system is outdated for what we would like to do. We are looking at hosting the city web sites in house. The firewall would also allow for VPN for people in the field. Mr. Maker said that this system would give us the capability to build a two tier firewall for the city. Mr. Desai asked if any firewalls were considered other than Cisco. Mr. Maker said they did not consider any other firewalls because Cisco is the best there is. Mr. Harton asked who would be supporting these. Mr. Maker said that we would be supporting these ourselves and we would get a maintenance agreement. 4.6 Discuss and consider a recommendation for the purchase of IP KVM. Mr. Maker explained that this will give us remote access to all servers that are connected to it. We would be able to connect all of our servers. He and any other IT personnel would be able to access them from their desktop with a username and password. Mr. Turner made a motion to recommend all items to City Council once bids are obtained. Mr. Porter seconded the motion. Items carried with 5 votes for and 0 opposed. I 5.0 I ADJOURNMENT With no further business, the meeting adjourned at 6:59 p.m. ./1 'Q' / /<~7 ,"/ / ~:/ 2