[Vms.sig-hu] Excellent OpenVMS Pearl - Vienna Firefighters plan a great future with OpenVMS - OK for external distribution (fwd)

[Fodor Zsuzsa]

-----Original Message-----
From: peter r. ranisch - OpenVMS V8.0 on Itanium(R) is on the road 
[mailto:peter.ranisch at chello.at] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 9:02 AM
To: Skonetski, Susan
Subject: Vienna Firefighters plan a great future with OpenVMS


Sue,

  Attached is a short overview about the histroy and the future of 
OpenVMS usage at the Vienna firefighters. You can distribute this as an 
OpenVMS Pearl. Further information about it could be acchieved by 
contacting Peter Götzl at gop at rts.co.at

Peter

_____________________

Vienna firefighters use OpenVMS for their call and mission center
 The mission planning system for Vienna's professional firefighters 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 
terminals (VT220 and VT240). The external sites were connected via 
terminal servers and serial lines to the headquarters. The 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 millennium end.  In 2000 
the MicroVAX 3800 and 2000 were replaced by 3 DS20s which included 
a RAID 320 controller to be able to do 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.  Starting in 2003 a general redesign of 
the environment will be done: The application software will be 
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.