Unisys to remove IBM's OS/2 from Police network

Unisys has won the contract to remove IBM's OS/2 from the Police network.

Unisys has won the contract to remove IBM’s OS/2 from the Police network.

The operating system will be removed from 362 LAN servers, nationwide and replaced by NT.

The task is planned for completion before the end of the year, “and we are confident we can do it by then”, says Police IT manager Jeffrey Soar.

OS/2 was replaced by NT on the Police’s client PCs in the middle of the now-canned Incis project, under a technology substitution clause. It was not removed from the servers at the time because NT was not considered stable enough for the task.

Since then the Police system has been running on a mixture of OS/2 and NT with some Unix. “We want to reduce the number of operating systems,” says Soar, and NT has matured.

Additionally, the OS/2 servers used security management software, which IBM has not supported generally for some time. “We had a special arrangement with them,” Soar says.

Standard modules within NT will now handle security management.

The OS/2 servers are purely for secure file transfer, print and access, and run no user applications.

Unisys won the contract in a standard open tender, with CSC and Southmark understood to be the other contenders.

One of Unisys’s strengths in winning the contract was its previous experience - having successfully completed several other OS/2 migration projects. The most recent include Australia Post and Portuguese bank Banco BPI.

Unix will remain part of the Police system because there are a number of Unix-specific applications running on the mainframe including SAP R/3 and PeopleSoft.

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Tags NTincisOS/2

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