Technical Services

Technical Services consists of three distinct groups: Systems and Network Administration, Telecommunications, and Data Center and Network Operations.

Technical Services is responsible for planning, designing, implementing, and administering the City’s telephone, computer, and radio infrastructure. Its core functions are data processing, data storage and security, telecommunications services, and hardware management. These functions are supported by a variety of operation and maintenance activities, to include:

Designing high-speed networks, analyzing traffic patterns, planning system capacity and storage needs, projecting growth and hardware obsolescence.

Replacing and repairing hardware components such as radios, telephones, servers and network switching devices.

Backing-up data and testing recovery procedures to ensure the security and integrity of the City’s data.

Working with other City departments to develop and enforce municipal telecommunication policies to protect right-of-way, attract high-tech businesses, and ensure citizen access to telecommunication services.

The current level of service is initiated either by a process (project plan) or by a service request. Technical Services personnel work closely with the Business Analysts and Programmer Analysts to plan and implement business solutions for the customer. A cooperative process between customer, Business Analyst and Technical Support Analyst results in the planning and pre-implementation of an infrastructure and production environment to support the desired business solution. Service requests for follow-up activity or repair come from the ITD Helpdesk and are initiated by a call from the customer.

Data processing, storage, and security are the core functions of Technical Services, which include many procedures for testing. To perform these functions effectively, we also rely on hardware and software solutions that work together to ensure data integrity and offer accessibility to the City’s information.

From a maintenance standpoint, Technical Services supports thousands of pieces of hardware, from handheld radios, telephones and computers to mountaintop antennae and miles of fiber optic cable. Every City building has an infrastructure of wiring and hardware for telephones and computers. Every police vehicle and fire truck has a radio, as well as every dump truck, refuse truck, and City bus. City workers require a variety of technologies to do their jobs. Technical Services is there to support them day and night.

One of the greatest challenges that Technical Services faces is “change management”. Computer technology is constantly changing, our customer’s requirements are changing, and the expectation placed on our department is changing. We must be prepared to challenge our assumptions, develop new methods of doing things and embrace change. Our future success depends upon maintaining good relationships with our customers, listening to them, and partnering with them to meet their goals.

This section presents five core strategies. These strategies, and the initiatives that support them, create a framework for technology efforts within the division.

Responsibility as a Regulator —

The City will maintain regulatory control over its rights-of-way within the confines of state and federal legislation and exercise that control consistently for telecommunications service providers while promoting interoperability among service providers. We will leverage any and all opportunities to extend our empty conduit network for future telecommunications use and the reduction of street cuts.

The City will retain licensing authority for the use of public property and will receive similar fair compensation from providers for use of that property. The City will also promote a telecommunications infrastructure that ensures universal accessibility to all City residents and businesses. Through the licensing process, the City will seek to gain equal access to the infrastructure in order to provide public services and information.

The City will continue to encourage competition in the provision of voice, video and data services to keep service prices affordable for City residents while regulating basic rates as allowable by law until effective competition develops.

The City will engage in an ongoing review of opportunities for implementation of telecommunications technology to improve customer service to City residents, promote public participation in local government, encourage communication among residents, and increase staff productivity while reducing operating costs. Equity in the provision of services is a major priority, and the City will ensure that all residents have access to City information and services offered through telecommunications.

The pace at which the City proceeds with utilization of telecommunications technology will be related to the balance between the current formats of service delivery and the known benefit versus the known cost of implementation and use of the technology. The long-term goal for the City as a provider of public services is to provide citizens with a method of communicating and doing business with the City that is most convenient and effective to meet their needs.

The City will actively seek out opportunities for partnerships with public and private organizations as a means to meet service needs.

The City’s telecommunications strategy will be linked to economic development strategies to encourage private sector investment in the construction of the telecommunications infrastructure, the development of high-tech office centers (Tech Oasis), and the use of telecommunications in the provision of City services to attract economic activities.

Infrastructure Reengineering —

The delivery of services will become more integrated. It no longer makes sense to view voice, data and video as different types of things. They can all be carried over the same network. However, there are still important differences in how people use services, and any ‘integrated’ network needs to take these into account. The City must still allow for dynamic system use, centralized control, innovative procedures and easy access to available bandwidth for priority data processing.

Reliability is more critical now than ever before. City staff has come to rely heavily on computer communications and the Internet. Network downtime, which might have been tolerated a few years ago, is no longer acceptable. As new time-critical services, such as IP telephony, videoconferencing and streaming video become more common, the requirement for constant network availability grows. Networks must be fault tolerant, with the duplication of critical hardware components and uninterruptible power systems (UPS) in the backbone. Cable route diversity and redundant routing protocols must be implemented where appropriate. Computers that provide critical network services, such as mail servers and name servers should also be duplicated in several locations on the network. Network reconfigurations should be done dynamically and should be transparent to the vast majority of users.

Bandwidth and storage needs are increasing exponentially each year. At the current rate of growth, the bandwidth required to backup the entire network would exceed the capacity of the City’s infrastructure in two years. ITD has begun moving toward Storage Area Networks (SAN) to provide the fault tolerance, speed, flexibility, and storage capacity to keep up with the business demands for storage. Backup strategies are incorporated into the design of the SAN and the capability to provide multiple access to resources means managing storage at the enterprise level instead of the application or network level. x

As previously mentioned, what had previously been thought of as data networks are increasingly carrying telephone, audio and video traffic. The City’s next generation network isn’t just a data network, it is becoming the main communications network, and in the future it may well be the only communications network in the City. The requirements for bandwidth in all parts of the network will continue to rise. The expected growth in demand for new services and the continual advancements in technology mean that the network will never reach a steady state or be complete. We need to continually revise the network’s standards and policies, and make changes in direction whenever appropriate.

End-to-end quality of service is essential for future applications. The network will need to handle voice, data, and video applications equally well. It will need to operate at high speeds, from the desktop, through the LAN and the backbone and out to the Internet. The network will also need to use traffic prioritization and bandwidth reservation protocols to ensure predictable and constant transmission rates.

Network Security is a top priority. Computer security and viruses are much in the news, and network security is a very important subset of that. The network is the pathway which hackers exploit to find vulnerable and poorly protected computers. It is also the delivery system for viruses. While good network security can never replace the need for proper attention to workstation security procedures, the network should be set up to make inappropriate access as difficult as possible. There should be scanners and filters in place to prevent viruses from being emailed or downloaded from the Internet. Protection of the City’s network is governed by security policies, intrusion alarms, firewalls, and authentication procedures.

Effective Resource Management —

The City’s network is becoming larger and more complex. It is essential that we have the appropriate tools in order to manage and operate it. With virtual LANs and LAN emulation, it is important that network managers have access to both physical and logical views of the network. Network management allows for problem detection, problem analysis, change tracking, capacity planning and congestion analysis. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has become a de facto industry standard, and ITD is setting up a central network management system based on SNMP, using HP Openview and management tools from Concord. SNMP statistics will be collected at various points in the network and stored centrally. We will make use of this data for network management, troubleshooting and traffic modeling. We will also make the statistics and raw data available to any department that requests it so that they can see their use of network resources and the reliability of the network.

Cable management is critical to a streamlined service process. The City has invested in a cable and asset management system called iTRACS . This tool allows for a centralized database of all cable facilities within the City. Whenever a “move, add, or change” service order is generated, this database can be queried to find available facilities in the building. As new cable and other communications assets are installed, a record of their installation will be entered into the iTRACS system. Each year reports are generated to give us an indication of where our plant upgrade budget should be spent in order to replace the oldest facilities.

Disaster Recovery Preparedness —

The network infrastructure is quickly becoming the most critical piece of the information sharing and communication process. A personal computer is nothing more than a window into a cloud of information. That cloud of information is the mesh of fibers, cables, servers, and disks we call the network. When the network is unavailable, few employees have all the resources available to them to do their jobs. In the event of a prolonged outage of the network due to a disaster, other arrangements would need to be made so that essential public service functions could continue.

We will ensure the Disaster Recovery Plan is updated and drills are held on an annual basis. It will be necessary to have physical redundancy for some of the fiber optic cables and copper cables between the telephone rooms and major network centers. The redundant path, which can take the form of wireless connections, will serve as a back up in case the primary cable is accidentally cut or damaged. This scheme will aid with the rapid restoration of telephone and data services should a failure occur.