ALPHA MIGRATION

One of CRIS’s key technical achievements is a sophisticated reservation and ticketing application called Country-Wide Network for Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing (CONCERT).

The primary challenge for CRIS is to provide an efficient passenger service by ensuring maximum uptime for its reservation/ticketing and inquiry application. The Railway must prepare charts that map passengers with their seats, and must post these charts outside each coach. CONCERT software enables the preparation of skeleton charts in advance for each train for the next three journey days.

Indian Railway’s current CONCERT application represents a steady progression of using the latest technologies available. In the mid-1980s, Indian Railways first computerized its reserved ticketing operation on VAX™ systems running VMS™. This was done from five regional passenger reservation centres, each of which was a stand-alone site with its own local database. During the mid- to late 1990s, CRIS introduced CONCERT, which linked the five passenger reservation centres so that reserved tickets from any station of Indian Railways could be issued to any other station from a single window.

The entire CONCERT application since its inception had been hosted on 5 VAX-VMS clusters located at the five PRS sites New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Secunderabad.  

With the tremendous growth of PRS terminals all over the country and the extra load of various interface software such as Internet enquiries, the overall load on the backend PRS system had increased manifold.

A need was felt to move the existing application from the VAX-VMS servers to Alpha VMS servers. The entire migration from the existing VAX VMS to Alpha VMS was done in a record time frame. The new platform also delivers significant cost savings and Time saving  another significant benefit of Indian Railway’s state-of-the-art IT platform.

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