Technology Services proposes purchasing the annual renewal for Nutanix hardware and software support as well as licensing for the City of Plano’s hyper-converged environment from Freeit Data Solutions, Inc. listed on DIR contract DIR-TSO-4288.
Because of the COVID pandemic, there was an immediate suspension and reduction of operations of several activities including municipal court cases. Retention of data was extended as a result of these delays and this exceeded far past what our storage capacity could support for operations. The City acquired Nutanix hardware, software, and licensing to support the increased data, backup, and server processing workloads for our primary and disaster recovery datacenters. A ratification of this COVID expenditure in the amount of $358,966.12 was approved by Council on July 27, 2020.
Purchasing requested quotes from multiple vendors and Freeit Data Solutions, Inc. was the only vendor to respond. An award of this renewal to Freeit Data Solutions, Inc. under the DIR contract in the amount of $215,258 will provide hardware and software support and licensing for one (1) year from March 31, 2021 to March 30, 2022.
If the City of Plano does not award this renewal, the City’s critical server infrastructure that supports this data may experience unexpected outages as a result of failed hardware and not having support to remediate issues. Additionally, we will no longer be compliant under the Nutanix licensing terms which could result in the inability to access this data.
The City is authorized to purchase from the State Contract list pursuant to Chapter 271 Subchapter D of the Texas Local Government Code and by doing so satisfies any State Law requiring local governments to seek competitive bids for items. (DIR Contract No. DIR-TSO-4288 / City of Plano Internal Contract No. 2021-0279-OR)