Glendale does data storage deal
The first real-time data storage facility for Glendale’s digital information will soon open in Burbank — marking the first time city technology departments have collaborated and a possible sea change in how the two governments could explore saving money through teamwork.
With both cities facing multi-million dollar budget shortfalls — $10 million in Glendale, $8.4 million in Burbank — a common refrain at City Hall centers on finding ways to share fiscal burdens.
The Glendale City Council originally approved $112,300 in construction costs to prepare the Burbank data storage facility to host its equipment, but city officials were forced to go back and request an additional $10,553 in January to finish construction.
Once it’s up and running, the backup storage will pull Glendale out of a vulnerable position, officials said.
“We obviously hope that we will never need to recover our information, but if this was not in place, we would be at a huge disadvantage,” Glendale Mayor Ara Najarian said.
Within the next few weeks, Glendale will store all back-up data for its $50-million smart-grid project in Burbank’s main information center, and is on schedule to begin storing regular business files, such as payroll information, by the end of the calendar year, said Edward Fraga, Glendale’s director of information services.
Glendale’s need for a new data center became more immediate when the economy forced the city to tighten its purse strings, effectively placing a new data center of its own on the backburner indefinitely, according to a Burbank city report.
“That was not the intention at all — we already have a very nice data center in our civic center,” Fraga said. “But we wanted to create a secondary site that was outside of Glendale, primarily in the event of any kind of disaster.”
The information technology departments in the tri-city region of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena meet quarterly to find mutually beneficial projects as they tighten their purse strings, officials said.
“We are having discussions about what systems can each city become the expert in order to be the support for all three cities,” said Phillip Leclair, acting chief information officer for Pasadena.
The first step has been taken to turn Pasadena into a regional area expert with an agreement to manage and support the information storage for Glendale library systems. Leclair said the city is in talks to perform the same services for Burbank.
Burbank and Glendale have worked together in the past for joint purchasing expenditures and contracts, such as the police helicopter program at Bob Hope Airport, but until now the cities have been unable to find a mutually beneficial project in the digital realm.
“The main prohibitive factor to collaborating like this before was basically finding a project that worked for both parties where the risk of impacting services to our customers is minimal,” said Burbank Technology Information Director Jennifer Wyatt. “We have to be very careful in weighing all potential projects to ensure the risk is minimal and any potential benefits outweigh the risks.”
For this particular project, the arrangement was easy: Burbank had the space available in its data center and Glendale needed it, Wyatt said.
Prior to the Burbank agreement, the city arranged weekly pick-ups of saved information by an outside company, but the new digital facility will have exact data for every moment in time.
Using less than $125,000 in one-time funds to upgrade the security of Glendale’s data is a small cost compared to hiring a private company for the job, Fraga said.
“This is the very least expensive way we could have done this,” he said. “It makes sense because we already have a mutual agreement and [connections] in place between the two cities.”