That the City Council approve and authorize the City Manager to execute a purchase order in the amount of $263,238.29 with Dell Computers for the purchase of two Dell EMC Unity storage equipment and two PowerEdge R650 servers.

Staff is recommending the purchase of two Dell EMC Unity storage equipment and two PowerEdge R650 servers in order to establish a disaster recovery (DR) environment for the City and Police Department computer networks. The number of successful cyberattacks upon public and private agency computer networks continue to grow every year.  Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and some system breaches have caused partial or complete computer network failures at public and private entities for prolonged periods of time, costing millions of dollars in downtime, disrupting critical operations, causing significant productivity loss, and costing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in recovery costs. This issue is compounded by the fact that many computer manufacturers are currently unable to provide replacement parts in a timely manner, sometimes due to the age of the equipment, a lack of inventory, or disruptions in supply chains.  Suppliers such as Dell and HPE have recently notified clients that delivery dates for new orders may currently lag by two to three months due to lingering effects of the pandemic on global supplies of parts, computer chips and other critical materials.  

The purpose of this purchase is to build a protected disaster recovery (DR) environment for the City.  A DR environment is better able to withstand and respond to a system outage caused by a catastrophic hardware failure or computer system breach, such as an attack that seeks a "ransom" to release control of a system or network.  With implementation of a DR environment, IT staff will not need to wait for parts or lose significant time recovering data from backup systems.  Staff can simply switch over to the DR environment and return to normal business operations within hours of an adverse event.
Even though the City has standardized its systems on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) network equipment, staff is recommending Dell EMC Unity DR equipment due to its favorable operational reviews, lower cost of ownership, better performance, and staff's familiarity with Dell equipment.  This purchase will also provide staff an opportunity to fully evaluate Dell's networking equipment for future potential changes without impacting the City's primary computer network.

Staff recommends the sole source purchase of this equipment directly from Dell Computers in accordance Municipal Code section 4.20.070 E - Exceptions to Bidding Requirement for Purchase of Goods and Services for the acquisition of information technology equipment.  Funding for the purchase has been approved in the adopted Fiscal Year 2020-2021 budget (Account #165152-8919).  No additional appropriation will be required.

T. 1.9 City Operations