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The main application poised to run across the frame relay network is JIMS (Jail Information Management System), an electronic booking system that tracks an inmate's record, movement and other information while he or she is housed in one of the county's seven detention centers. Inmates will be outfitted with bar-coded wristbands when JIMS goes live in early 2001.

"This is cutting-edge technology for sheriffs' departments," says Keith Fernandez, network analyst for the San Diego Sheriff's Office. "JIMS will let deputies scan inmates' wristbands and get complete histories of their offenses, whom they have been housed with and where, medical information--everything deputies would [need]. All of that is manual today."

Seven NT-based JIMS servers will be installed in each of the detention centers' switched 100BASE-T Ethernet LANs, and will be replicated to mirrored servers at the data center over the frame relay network. The department also will run centralized repositories for pharmacy, fingerprint and mug-shot functions at the data center.

The detention centers will employ Cisco Systems 3600 and 2600 routers for access to the frame relay network, and for routing office applications, such as e-mail, over the ATM WAN.

Fernandez says the highly sensitive, around-the-clock JIMS application will get network priority over other office applications if there's a data circuit failure.

Now the sheriff's department is converting the state's CAL-ID fingerprint scanning system to year 2000 compliance and a new server-based architecture. That way, JIMS will be able to pass data to CAL-ID for identifying inmates.

So far, the only major snag in the network has been a defect in the ATM cards in the Cisco routers. The cards caused a memory leak that for several months kept knocking about a dozen of the sheriff departments' sites offline, Fernandez says. "We had to reboot the routers at least once or twice a week," he says. The department since has upgraded the cards.

Some of the network decisions--such as the implementation of dedicated T1 pipes among its sites--were dictated by its contract with TRW, the systems integrator for JIMS. Not everything is set in stone, though: San Diego County is in the process of outsourcing its IT operations in one of the industry's largest deals ever for a county government. Although the sheriff's department and district attorney's office were the only IT groups left intact, whoever assumes the county's other IT functions could modify its ATM WAN, Fernandez says.