Finance Committee backs $17,374.99 replacement of sheriff's Emergitech server

The DeWitt County Finance Committee on March 17 recommended that the full county board approve replacing a failing Emergitech file server used by the sheriff's office, Clinton and Farmer City police departments. The committee voted to send the recommendation after being told the replacement would cost $17,374.99 and could be covered from the contingency budget.

County Administrator Dee Rentmeister and committee members reviewed a Heart Technologies proposal and a statement of work that describes physical installation, configuration for virtualization, migration of file shares (the county's so-called "I drive") and restoration of a virtualized backup. In an email included in the meeting packet, Aaron Sherman, Network Engineer at Heart Technologies, wrote, "Right now, there is around 3TB worth of data that the Sheriff's office has stored on the Emergitech server." The packet says the server hosts roughly 20 years of CAD data that was not migrated into Spillman and must be preserved.

Heart's written quote (version 2) lists hardware, licensing and migration labor and sets the total at $17,374.99 with a 50/30/20 payment schedule. The statement of work notes labor to perform cutovers, group policy deployment for drive mapping and decommissioning of the old server. Committee members were told the replacement is intended to preserve access to archival files and to restore a virtual image of the old Emergitech 2008 R2 server.

The Finance Committee voted by voice vote to recommend the purchase to the full board; the matter is listed as a recommendation to the full board and will be considered at the board meeting that follows committee action. The Finance Committee's next meeting is scheduled for April 21, 2025.