GULF SHORES, Ala. — A proposal is being considered by the Gulf Shores City Council that would update the way information is stored in the city’s data center.

At the present time, the Gulf Shores Police Department, fire department, and every other department in the city depends heavily on the data center that is located in city hall.

In the event of a hurricane or any other event that might cause problems with the data center, there are concerns that the current process of backing up information is not adequate.  

“Right now, the way we are protecting ourselves in the event of some type of disaster, not just a hurricane, but all the way down to a flood, a fire, or just the roof leaking above the room, anything that would stop our equipment from functioning, we are using backup tapes,” said Lee Hartley, an IT Technician for the city. “Over a period of time, the success rate of information being pulled from these tapes is not 100 percent.”

Hartley said it could be dangerous having all of the city’s vital information in one room without an up-to-date backup system.

The new disaster recovery proposal would allow the IT Department to purchase virtualization software that would allow them to take their existing servers and make them look like multiple servers so they could re-deploy some of the existing servers to the secondary sight without having to purchase the exact same equipment to duplicate it.

“It would be a mirror image of the same setup that we have here at City Hall. In the event of any type of disaster, we could resume functionality at the second location immediately,” Hartley said.

Total cost for the project would be $154,000, and IT Department manager Diane Brown hopes they can get started on the project as soon as possible.

“We recommend that we do it during the winter months,” Brown told the City Council at last Monday’s meeting. “First of all, this is a fairly significant change to our network and not something we want to put off and do in the summertime with the threat of hurricanes. Also, there is an interdependency with this project and one that we hope to do in March of next year for voice over IT, replacing our phone system.”

Brown said there was some critical infrastructure work that this puts into play and will give the department January and February to prepare for the phone system project.

Councilman Jason Dyken, who heads the city’s finance committee, said they had looked at this project, and despite the cost of the project, the cost of not doing it would be significantly greater should a disaster occur.

Brown said the process of putting the new system into place can be done in-house and will not require additional personnel to set it up.