Cotati City Council
Agenda Staff Report
Item type: CONSENT CALENDAR (ACTION)
To: City Council
Subject: PURCHASE OF NETWORK SWITCH AND RELATED
EQUIPMENT
Date: May 14, 2024
Written by: Damien O'Bid, City Manager
Recommendation
It is recommended that the City Council adopt a resolution authorizing the appropriation of funds and the purchase of a network switch and related equipment.
Background
The City’s administrative computer network has switches in various locations to control data traffic between city facilities. This includes switches in the Police Building. Among the switches at this facility is a switch that, among other things, controls data traffic to Sonoma County ISD (ISD). ISD is contracted by the Sonoma County Public Safety Consortium to host and maintain the police data systems for member agencies. This primarily includes the records management system (RMS), the computer aided dispatch (CAD), and the mobile data computers (MDC). The switch that controls the traffic between our Police building, City Hall and Sonoma County ISD has exceeded its service life and needs replacement.
Analysis/Discussion
The network switches and router in the Police Department telecommunications room provide the connectivity to both ISD and city resources. It is important to note that they are dependent on one another; meaning, without connectivity to city resources, Police Department devices are unable to resolve county resource names to IP addresses, and therefore cannot access those ISD resources at all. ISD resources such as RMS and DAT are the most critical for the Police Department and access to them is dependent on connectivity to city hall.
The most immediate issue is that the switches and router in that room are not protected from power outages by a UPS. There is a need to install a UPS immediately in that rack so that when electrical power is lost, the devices remain up until the generator starts.
Secondly, we have a hardware age and health problem. There are currently (3) network switches in the PD server room; (2) of them are well beyond their service life and considered End-Of-Life (EOL) by their manufacturer. Of those two, one is 11 years old and the other 8. Both are experiencing hardware failures: the first routinely fails to power on completely due to problems decompressing the operating system image during the boot process, so manual intervention is required. The second has failing fan(s). These EOL switches are also no longer supported by their manufacturer and are no longer receiving updated software/firmware, making them a security concern.
Contributing to the power outages and hardware health and age, the compatibility of these EOL devices causes problems with uplink/downlink to other switches in the Police Department and city hall because of ”spanning tree protocol“ version mismatches and behavior differences in the trunking protocols between them. This can has also been the source of problems with access to ISD resources and smaller switches such as in Dispatch and the Report Writing room.
When the two EOL switches are replaced, the Police Department core switches and routers will act as a single logical unit as they will utilize “stacking” technology. This provides resiliency in that any 1 of the 3 can fail, but the other 2 remain up doing the work; It also provides a significant reduction in complexity and potential for disruption as the three switches communicate with themselves using internal stack connectivity and connect to all other devices as a single logical unit.
These switches were already included in our approved long-term infrastructure design and were budgeted for replacement next fiscal year (FY 24-25). That design’s primary goal is enhancing resiliency and reliability by reducing single points of failure and making redundant connections wherever possible. Replacing these switches and installing a UPS now contributes to that long term goal and resolves the recurring problems.
Financial Considerations
The work includes two switches, licensing, cabling and uninterruptable power supply, taxes and labor to install, test and document the equipment. The proposal from KLH is a not to exceed total of $28,911.58. As mentioned earlier, while this was planned for replacement next fiscal year, due to the current issues that can unexpectedly interrupt police operations, staff are recommending appropriating the funds in the current fiscal year to expedite the replacement of this network equipment.
Environmental Issues
This action is found to qualify for a Class 1 Categorical Exemption under CEQA Section 15301 in that the project consists of the operation, repair, maintenance, permitting, leasing, licensing, or minor alteration of existing public or private structures, facilities, mechanical equipment, or topographical features, involving negligible or no expansion of the existing or former use.