Cape Girardeau County OKs buying new data storage system

At the request of the county's internet technology director, Cape Girardeau County commissioners voted unanimously Monday, April 24, to buy a hybrid storage device to house the county's data.

Commissioners Clint Tracy, Paul Koeper and Charlie Herbst agreed to use already-budgeted funds to buy a "storage area networking" device, an HPE Alletra 5030, from ISG Technologies for $112,432.85.

IT director Eric McGowen said the county had previously budgeted as much as $125,000 this year to cover the purchase.

"This is the direction we need to move," said McGowen, who has headed the county's IT department for 19 years.

"We want to push as much (data) to the cloud as possible," he added, noting the ISG agreement provides for 24/7 support with a guarantee of no more than a four-hour response time to problems.

"HP Alletra 5030 operates via an on-premise/cloud-based (hybrid) basis, but this purchase puts us on the path to a primarily cloud-based environment."

Need

McGowen said the county's current 30 TB (terabyte) HP Nimble device was purchased in April 2018 and the manufacturer told Cape Girardeau County's IT office the equipment will reach "end of support" status in November, meaning no more security updates will be provided and no more support contracts will be available.

Besides, McGowen said, the county's 30 TB limit was reached three weeks ago and added that the new system will allow a storage capacity of 84 TB.

"(This) integrated cloud storage provided (will alleviate) any future storage space issues," McGowen assured the commissioners in a letter requesting the purchase.

A terabyte is a unit of digital data equal to about 1 trillion bytes of information. The term "terabyte" is typically used as a measure for storage capacity or the amount of stored data, To hold 1 TB of information would require 728,177 floppy disks or 1,498 CDs, according to www.techtarget.com.