In a move that will cut costs and also protect against system failures, the City of Dalton is completing work on consolidating computer services for all city departments onto a pair of centralized IBM Blade Center servers.
The Blade Center servers, hosted at City Hall and the Dalton Police Services Center, will last between 8 to 10 years without needing to be replaced, and requiring only minor upgrades. Previously, each city department had its own computer server which needed to be replaced every three years. The city had to replace 24 servers every three years at a cost of nearly $6,000 per server. Over a ten-year period, that amounts to nearly $647,000 to maintain computer servers. Over the same period, the Blade Center solution will cost less than $340,000. The new IBM Blade Centers require less power than the older servers, and they also generate less heat which reduces cooling costs.
“Over a 10-year period,” says Dalton Police Lt. Mike Key, who has helped to oversee the project, “we estimate… it’s going to save us at least 50 percent of what we would have spent on servers during that time.”
“Expenditures will actually go down, as far as what we have to spend to maintain everything,” says Dalton City Councilman George Sadosuk. “There are very real money savings with this system… usually you’re looking at how much more do we need to spend next year to upgrade our systems. We are putting in state of the art stuff, and it won’t need to be upgraded.”
The biggest benefit of the new Blade Center servers is gaining new protections against system failure. If either Blade Center experiences a failure, the other Blade Center can take over all city computer functions with only a brief interruption. For example, the servers at the Police Department fail, service could be taken over at City Hall and computers in patrol cars and at the Police Services Center would be able to operate again in as little as 20 minutes.
Click "Play" in the window below to watch a video on Dalton's new technology upgrade (Video may take a few moments to load, click the "HQ" icon to watch in higher quality).
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