Tickets will be sent from another platform - Newspaper Kommersant No. 223 (7424) dated 12/01/2022

Tickets will be sent from another platform - Newspaper Kommersant No. 223 (7424) dated 12/01/2022



JSC Russian Railways estimated the cost of replacing foreign information systems at 6.4 billion rubles, follows from the passports of projects sent to the specialized industrial competence center (ICC). Now the Russian Railways systems work on the z/Architecture platform, which is compatible only with equipment from IBM, which stopped supporting its Russian customers due to military operations in Ukraine. Such a situation, they warn in the monopoly, threatens to stop ticket sales, stop international transportation. When migrating from the IBM platform, you will have to replace all components and rebuild the server fleet, experts say.

Kommersant got acquainted with the passports of Russian Railways projects to replace software products from IBM, SAP and Oracle with Russian developments, the documents were sent to the specialized industrial competence center (ICC, unites representatives of different industries who need to replace foreign software). It follows from the documents that Russian Railways plans to allocate a total of 6.4 billion rubles. own funds for nine projects for import substitution of various foreign software: locomotive accounting systems, solutions for modeling passenger flows, infrastructure management, etc. The Ministry of Transport did not answer Kommersant, JSC Russian Railways declined to comment.

The most expensive of the announced projects (implementation will cost 1.84 billion rubles) provides for the development of a new version of the Express ACS ticketing system, which will be able to work on the widespread x86-64 processor architecture. The current version of the system, Express-3 automated control system, runs on the IBM z/Architecture platform, which is used exclusively by high-performance servers from IBM.

In June, IBM announced a complete cessation of activities in Russia, while the company, as TAdviser reported, from the first day of Russia's hostilities in Ukraine, stopped working with Russian Railways. The lack of support threatens to stop sales of railway tickets, stop international transportation and "reduce the mobility of citizens of the Russian Federation," the project's passport says. It is planned to reproduce all the critical functions of Express-3 on the new version by December 2024, but the implementation “must be started no later than the first quarter of 2023”.

The developer of the system, JSC All-Russian Research Institute of Railway Transport (VNIIZhT, owned by Russian Railways), refused to disclose information about the project to Kommersant. In April 2022, Deputy General Director of VNIIZhT Elena Martynova told the Gudok newspaper about work on the Express. New generation". It follows from the material that Russian Railways plans to start decommissioning Express-3 from 2024. Russian Railways is going to create a new version of the Express automated control system based on Red OS and the database management system (DBMS) Postgres Pro Enterprise. The monopoly, according to the project passport, already has licenses for this software, so "there is no need to purchase Russian-made products."

Deputy General Director of Postgres Professional Ivan Panchenko confirmed to Kommersant that Russian Railways has a license that allows you to use the DBMS within the company on any supported OS: “Technical support can be provided under the current contract.” Red Soft told Kommersant that they "regularly supply Red OS to the carrier, including for use in automated systems."

In the conditions of force majeure, when there were difficulties with servicing z/Architecture in Russia, it is impossible not to leave the IBM architecture, “everything will have to be changed: the hardware platform, operating environment and DBMS,” says Anton Yakimov, deputy general director of the T1 group for technological development. According to Kommersant's interlocutor in a major Russian electronics manufacturer, the transfer of the ticketing system to alternative platforms "will be painful." “We will have to completely change the server park, purchasing other, and not Russian, but foreign equipment. The fact is that domestic manufacturers do not produce similar ones in terms of server power and fault tolerance,” he emphasizes. Another option, the expert says, is then to wait until Russian companies release a sufficiently fault-tolerant and powerful server.

Yuri Litvinenko, Timofey Kornev, Natalia Skorlygina



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