CITY COUNCIL AGENDA ITEM
ACTION REQUESTED:
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Approve the award of Sole Source Procurement 23-083, GE Lentronics MPLS System, to GE Grid Solutions, LLC for an amount not to exceed $261,105.76
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DEPARTMENT: Electric Utility
SUBMITTED BY: Brian Groth, Director
BOARD/COMMISSION REVIEW:
N/A
BACKGROUND:
The Electric Utility (Utility) has used the Lentronics SONET Multiplexer equipment at all 16 substations, the Electric Service Center, and the Municipal Center since 2013 to efficiently utilize fiber optic cable. Currently the system allows multiple circuits of relay protection and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) traffic over two strands of fiber and provides extremely fast switching time in the event of a fiber cable cut.
The Utility must upgrade to the JPAX MPLS system because the manufacturer plans to make the SONET system obsolete and will no longer produce the parts for this system. For the initial phase of this upgrade, the Utility intends to add the JPAX upgrade to eight of the 18 Multiplexer locations. This new equipment is compatible with the old system, will provide additional secure bandwidth for future relay upgrades and will be implemented with minimal disruption of relay or SCADA traffic. The new system will also provide a secure method of downloading relay reports and configuration changes remotely.
DISCUSSION:
The Utility has determined that GE Grid Solutions, LLC is still the sole provider of the hardware and software needed for the GE MPLS JPAX system. There are no other vendors that allow for interoperability options with the existing JMUX system and an upgrade path that will allow the flexibility of keeping the existing system and limiting SCADA communication outages while upgrading to the new MPLS system. JMUX and JPAX are the only systems that allow the City to remain on the existing SCADA and relay protection scheme while building out an upgrade that will meet future requirements of IP based SCADA. The Utility is ...
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