By Kerry Lyman
The Fernley City Council approved a six-month contract at its Nov. 19 meeting with PacStates, an information technology (IT) services provider from Reno, to completely rebuild the city’s IT infrastructure at a cost of $551,660.
Upgrades to the city’s IT system are sorely needed according to Mayor Neal McIntyre, who said he didn’t know how many times he had seen staff in the middle of doing something, only to have the system crash “and then they have to go in and start all over again.”
Occurrences like that will not happen under the new IT system because everything will be auto-saved to the cloud, according to Ryan Baskharoon, a cyber security expert with PacStates.
“So, if it does crash, they can pull it right back up and it saves it right where they left off,” he said.
Baskharoon said many of the city’s difficulties with IT comes from the age of “a lot of outdated equipment,” with firewalls, routers and other equipment being at least 10 years old.
He recalled an instance when in Acting City Manager Lydia Altick’s office, he saw her try to pull up a PDF on her computer and it would not even display.
“It was all just a blank screen,” and she had to close everything and open it again in order to get it to display, he said.
Under the contract, all the city’s personal computers will be replaced, as well as servers, switches, Wi-Fi routers, etc.
“There will be all new equipment and cables in the network room,” Baskharoon said. It also will be a redundant system, so that if one piece of equipment goes down, there will be backup to take its place, he said.
The new IT system will also incorporate a battery backup power system that will provide an uninterrupted power supply to protect hard drives in the system servers for approximately an hour to an hour and a half, providing more than enough time to safely shut everything down in the event of a power loss, Baskharoon said.
PacStates will be replacing a lot of hardware equipment with cloud-based systems which are easier to manage.
“And you’re not replacing hardware all the time,” he said. “The only hardware we would be replacing every three to five years would be desktops.”
The new IT system will have two firewalls for added security and the city’s Wi-Fi system will be upgraded to version seven. Baskharoon said he thinks the city’s current Wi-Fi is version five or lower, resulting in a person not being able to keep a Wi-Fi connection walking from one end of City Hall to another.
Councilman Ryan Hanan said he would like for the network room to have a chemical fire suppression system to prevent all the equipment being ruined by water. He also advocated a better access control system for the network room, rather than a keyed entry, a card entry, “so we can tell who is going into that room and out of that room at what times,” he said.
Baskharoon said the network room would have to be redesigned to include a chemical fire suppression system, but it could be looked at. He added that since a lot of equipment in the network room will be removed and cloud-based under the new system, “there won’t be so much heat in there or the possibility of a fire.”
Baskharoon also said PacStates is currently working on better access control to the network room. In response to a question from Councilman Albert Torres, he said PacStates will also produce a cyber security and procedures manual as part of their contract.
In other action last week also involving PacStates, the council approved a three-year contract with PacStates to be the private partner in a hybrid or co-managed IT system, with in-house city staff and PacStates staff both managing the city’s IT system.
Earlier this year, PacStates provided an assessment of the city’s IT system, providing four alternatives to make it more efficient and reliable, recommending the co-managed or hybrid system, which they said was the industry standard.
When asked during that presentation of alternatives why PacStates did not submit a co-managed system proposal, Baskharoon said they did not think it appropriate to do so since they were only hired to access the city’s IT system and make recommendations. But the council unanimously voted to seek bids for a co-managed IT system.
Requests for Proposals for a co-managed IT system were sent out in September, with the city receiving four proposals. PacStates received the highest rating in an evaluation of the proposals by the city’s IT selection committee, a staff report noted.
Negotiations with PacStates resulted in a three-year contract proposal at a cost of $20,755 a month, with a one-time “onboarding” fee of $20,755, which the council approved unanimously.
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