Humboldt Safety Commission looks at equipment refresh

By APRIL KELLEY

An upgrade to the current Motorola system used by the Humboldt County Law Enforcement Center was a widely debated issue during the last Public Safety Commission meeting.

Chris Madison, IT Director and Kyle Bissell, EMA Coordinator brought it to the Commission’s attention that the system, which is now five years old, is extremely outdated and needs to be updated, or as Motorola calls it, a refresh.

Madison explained that this refresh is necessary to update the flex servers, MAP servers, and VPN servers which is how the officers connect back to the FLEX server from their vehicles and the back-up server.

All of those servers run on one physical box, similar to different rooms in one house. The box that holds all of those servers is now 5-years-old and very outdated.

After discussing the issue with Motorola, Madison dis-covered there were two options through Motorola Solutions, a company that works frequently with the Motorola brand. One would cost approximately $330,000 with the second option costing approximately $200,000. Both of those amounts would be spread over five years.

According to Madison, the hardware, in other words the physical box with the servers in it, would get updated as well as back up hardware for the main server.

They will also update the server operating systems to the new industry standards as well as migrate the current information from the servers they are on now to the new system.

The new system would monitor the server, giving warnings if there are any issues, allowing Madison and other public employees to have advance notice of an upcoming issue in time to repair or replace the server.

Read the full story in this week's issue of the Humboldt Independent!