Customer Details:
CRIS & Indian Railways
All Over India
Brief on Unreserved Ticketing System
Twenty-one million passengers travel daily on Indian Railways using the unreserved
journey facility. An unreserved ticket authorizes these journeys but offers no
reserved seats or berths. The ticket is not specific to a train service either. This
facility is predominantly used by commuters and suburban travellers – over short
distances where assured seating is not a necessity. Tickets are issued to the
unreserved passenger any time of day or night as booking offices remain open 24
hours a day, seven days a week.
The Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) caters to this segment of the market and
seeks to provide a centrally administered computerized ticketing system over the
entire Indian Railways. Today more than ninety percent of the unreserved tickets are
sold through this system.
Opportunity:
CRIS wanted to deploy thin client at UTS ticketing counters, with fan less design and
no moving parts due to the different climate condition across India which can’t be
sustained by any regular desktop computer as one application required for most of
the users to run and do the UTS ticket booking.
Challenges:
- Highly secured & lower maintenance client required for users to enable lesser
downtime in terms of hardware & software - 24 x 7 working
- Should be able to sustain different climatic condition like very high & low
temperatures, humid conditions and on top of that no air conditioning environment
at most of the places - Must be easily Manageable from remote to reduce the IT support calls and to reduce
the Client down time - Easy to Implement, Configuring & troubleshoot
- Ability to push patches etc. remotely
- Data security (Highly confidential information which should not be allowed to taken
away from any of the UTS counters) - Low footprint to ensure minimum physical space required, since counters has limited
space
Server, Data Base, Application & other details:
- HP Server (Itanium)
- Server OS – HP AUX
- Database ASE_CE (Adaptive Server Enterprise Cluster Edition)
- Mobilink Server running RHEL OS for Syncing
- Client Application in C++
Requirements:
- CRIS UTS application runs on emulation environment developed in C ++
- Client-side ASA 10 to be loaded locally on to the flash
- Thin Client should be able to hold more than 15 days ticketing data
- Two Flash, one in primary & secondary each for redundancy
- With Primary having OS, RDBMS, Fare table etc. and secondary having ticket data
- Fare Display connectivity thru serial ports
- Customised Linux with support of legacy applications
- OS size not exceeding 800 MB
- ISCII library support to print Hindi on tickets
- Dot Matrix Printer used for ticket printing with both parallel and serial port support
- USB ports to be disabled for storage device access for data security
Solution:
Deployed Breeze ECC Thin Client
Configuration:
Operating System – Embedded Customised Linux with kernel 2.6.32 (as required
by CRIS) within 800 MB
Software – Emulation suite, ISCII Library, Java and other required dependencies
Hardware- 1.8Ghz Dual Core processor, 2 GB RAM, 8GB FLASH,6 USB ports, one
Parallel printer Port, Two Serial Port etc.
By deploying Breeze thin client following objectives were achieved in addition overcoming
all the challenges mentioned above –
As the thin clients are without any moving part, the maintenance is very
low compared to regular desktop
The OS & Software’s are stored in Flash drive which ensured faster speed
With USB storage disabled, no unauthorised access to data
No fiddling with configuration etc.
Protection from viruses and malware attacks
Consumes ¼ power compared to a regular desktop, ensuring Hugh
savings on power bills