Toledo's Information and Data Sharing Initiative

Over the years, as NORIS user agencies have increased and new applications have been developed to support the needs of our users, new servers were added to the NORIS data center. Currently, the 42 servers in the NORIS data center range in age from one year to 11 years old. The older servers may cause the applications to run slower and are more likely to have hardware issues. Having 42 servers also requires a lot of network staff time as servers require upgrades to their operating systems, malware and anti-virus upgrades, and troubleshooting of issues. Repurposing the portion of the Justice Reinvestment Grant that now is not needed for the ODRC data, to allow the CJCC to purchase four high performance servers for the NORIS data center to replace the existing 42 servers would provide an update-to-date data center for the criminal justice applications that run 24x7. Potential annual savings could also be realized in reduced support for the current environment including less back-up equipment due to reduced servers, reduction in windows server licenses, reduction in maintenance contracts for servers, and reduction in anti-virus licenses. Reducing the number of servers in the NORIS data center would also reduce the cost of a cloud-based disaster recovery solution. As part of our long-range planning, NORIS has been analyzing and planning a new disaster recovery site during the past year after a major power outage in 2019 pointed out the shortcomings of our existing disaster recovery site. During the power outage, not all applications were accessible and applications that were available were running slower due to the age of our disaster recovery servers. Public safety was at risk when some of our applications were not available. With the purchase of four high performance servers, the newest servers in the NORIS data center would be relocated to our disaster recovery site. This would provide enhanced disaster recovery performance when the NORIS data center is not available until we can move our disaster recovery site to the cloud. By allowing the CJCC to utilize this high-performing strategy and reinvest in the NORIS data center, NORIS could increase its cost effectiveness of maintaining our criminal justice applications and increase public safety.