Franklin technology commission backs extended warranty with Hitachi option for SAN replacement

The Franklin Technology Commission voted Wednesday to pursue an extended private warranty for its aging storage area networks as a near‑term fallback and signaled preference for a Hitachi NVMe replacement if capital funding can be secured.

Director of Technology Jim Matelski told the commission the city currently operates mirrored SANs at City Hall and the police department, and that Hewlett Packard’s hardware is now end‑of‑life and difficult to maintain. “We can’t get parts from HP anymore,” Matelski said, describing the SAN that has served the city for more than a decade.

Matelski said the City Hall SAN has roughly 40 terabytes of raw disk capacity (about 35 TB in RAID 6, with roughly 10 TB provisioned) while the police SAN is larger because it previously hosted squad‑car video. He said many video workloads have been moved to the cloud, reducing on‑premises demand.

The IT department presented three procurement paths: a full replacement from Hewlett Packard (MSA line), a lower‑capacity Dell PowerVault option and a Hitachi NVMe system. Matelski said the HP option’s project cost was about $242,000 (the city’s budget for the item is $242,333), leaving a narrow margin; the Hitachi option was presented as a faster NVMe alternative that would come in under that project number. He also described a third‑party maintenance (3PM) plan that would extend warranty and support for the existing SANs at substantially lower near‑term cost.

Matelski framed the replacement as a bridge to an eventual cloud migration. “We have a plan that we will decommission our data centers in 2029, 2030 at max,” he said, and described three migration tasks: moving the ESNA system, migrating ProPhoenix to its cloud offering and moving file shares into SharePoint.

Commissioners pressed the director on timing, consolidation and financing. Questions included whether the two mirrored SANs could be consolidated, whether leasing would be cheaper than buying, and how to treat the expense as capital versus operating. Matelski said consolidation is possible but poses network and core‑switch upgrade implications; he also noted that shifting funds from capital to operating would require finance‑director approval.

After discussion a motion was made, seconded and adopted to pursue an extended private warranty (3PM) as the near‑term approach and to use the Hitachi proposal as the replacement option should the city decide to replace the units. The motion passed on a voice vote.

The commission’s votes and discussion made clear the principal tradeoffs: keeping the legacy SANs with extended warranty reduces near‑term spend and frees roughly $184,000 for other projects, while full replacement — particularly an NVMe Hitachi solution — would deliver higher performance but require capital outlay and integration work. The commission directed staff to refine the procurement language for the city council’s consideration and to consult the director of finance about allowable capital accounting treatments.