[Vms.sig-hu] OpenVMS Pearls - Vienna Fights Fires with OpenVMS - OK for external use (fwd)

[Fodor Zsuzsa]

---------- Továbbított levél ----------
Dátum: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 13:18:04 -0500
Feladó: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Címzett: Skonetski, Susan <susan.skonetski at hp.com>
Tárgy: OpenVMS Pearls - Vienna Fights Fires with OpenVMS - OK for 
external use

Many thanks to OpenVMS Champion Terry Shannon.

Warm Regards,
Sue


http://www.shannonknowshpc.com/stories.php?
story=04/03/31/2504265

Where there's smoke, there's fire. And where there's fire in Vienna,
there's OpenVMS. The mission planning system for professional
firefighters in Vienna, Austria was put into service in 1988. The system
was in charge of the active missions and did the alarming of 24 remote
fire stations throughout Vienna. The hardware consisted of 2 VAX-
11/750
servers with 20 VT220 and VT240 terminals. The external sites were
connected via terminal servers and serial lines to the headquarters.

The original operating system was VMS 3.7, ORACLE was used as a
database, and programming was done in C. Two PDP-11s running RSX-
11M
were used as preprocessors for data gathering on the status of the
emergency vehicles. The PDP-11s also displayed the status of these
vehicles on 6 monitors. 

In 1989 the VAX-11/750s were replaced by VAX 11/780s to improve
performance. In 1993 the 11/780s were replaced by 2 MicroVAX 3800s. 
An
additional MicroVAX 2000 was used for training and test purposes. VMS
was upgraded to version 5.1.

In 1998 the PDP-11 was replaced by Windows/NT boxes due to Y2K 
issues.
In 2000 the MicroVAX 3800 and 2000 were replaced by 3 AlphaServer 
DS20s
which included a RAID 320 controller to enable hardware-based 
mirroring.
OpenVMS 7.1 was used together with ORACLE 8.0 and the program 
source was
ported to C++. 

The control stations are still terminal-based, but some of the terminals
have been replaced with Windows-based PCs and terminal emulators. 
Since
July 2002 the DS20 has been running under OpenVMS 7.3-2. 

A general redesign of the environment began about a year ago. The
application software was completely rewritten in C++ and C#. The 3 
DS20s
servers will be connected via DCOM and .NET to 50 Windows clients.
Redundancy will be application-driven; no clustering will be used. The
operating system will be 7.3-2 and ORACLE 9.x. The servers will be
connected via two independent LANs, one 100MB-based and the other
Gigabit. Each external site will be connected via 3 different
independent networks to the headquarters. All systems will be 
monitored
via SNMP. A giant video wall with twelve projection screens will display
all mission-relevant information. The project is planned to be completed
by 2006.