Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) will deploy five new HP Itanium servers to speed up e-ticketing operations.
IRCTC has already imported five new servers from Singapore that will change the way passengers book rail tickets on its digital platform.
On June 1, IRCTC installed two Linux-enabled servers, substantially increasing the booking capacity of e-tickets. Indian rail passengers benefitted during tatkal reservation thanks to the installation of Linux-enabled servers that have doubled peak-time efficiency for booking tatkal tickets in the morning hours.
IRCTC Chairman and Managing Director AK Manocha in a statement said that the five new HP Itanium servers being installed shortly in the middle layer of the Passenger Reservation System (PRS) would speed up the booking of e-tickets and streamline the Next Generation E-Ticketing System (NGET).
“There are already five servers in the PRS at its middle layer. With the addition of five new servers from Singapore, their number would go up to ten,” Manocha said.
M.Srinivas MS, additional GM (Software), IRCTC said the introduction of five new high-speed servers would substantially enhance the website performance.
With the adding of five new servers, the number of concurrent users will go up from the existing 180,000 to 300,000 while the existing capacity to book around 15,000 tickets per minute will go up considerably.
IRCTC is also planning to increase its network bandwidth from the existing 1.4 GB to 1.7 GB in order to enhance the performance of e-ticketing operations.
At present, 54 percent train tickets in the country are booked through the IRCTC website. The daily sale of train tickets through the portal, which is the world’s second busiest with 3 crore registered users, is around 5.5 to 6 lakhs. It has registered a record 14,800 tickets per minute.
IRCTC upgraded the website in end-April last year, facilitating 150,000 users at a time and the ability to entertain 1,000 enquiries per second.
On April 1 this year, when advance reservation period was made 120 days, IRCTC improved its record by enabling booking of 13,45,000 tickets.
