24 September 2007 - Springfields Fuels Ltd (formerly British Nuclear Fuels Ltd), which has provided products and services to over 140 reactors in more than 12 countries, has awarded to Transoft, part of IRIS, a £530,000 contract to migrate the Control Systems Application Software for its Oxide Fuels Complex.

The Control Systems Application Software controls the manufacture of fuel elements for nuclear stations in the UK. The plant takes Uranium Hexafluoride supplied in cylinders and converts this to Uranium Oxide powder. The powder is “slugged” and turned into pellets and these are built into stacks and loaded into fuel pins. The pins are loaded into a graphite sleeve to create a fuel element. This is boxed up and sent to the power stations. All data from the plant is fed into a shared proprietary Rdb database. The applications currently run under OpenVMS on HP (DEC) VAX server hardware and are written in Pascal and C using the Rdb database and DCL scripting language.

The plant is currently being modernised and the replacement of the VAX hardware is part of this refurbishment. Transoft, a leader in helping companies evolve their existing legacy systems, competed in an open EU procurement process to win this prestigious contract. It will migrate these applications using its Legacy Liberator toolset to a Windows 2003 Server environment. The Pascal code will be converted to C, and together with the applications' C code will be transferred, with Oracle 10g replacing the Rdb database, to operate in the target environment. The Transoft Open Libr8 and Open DCL products will also be deployed to support the OpenVMS systems services and DCL scripts respectively.

Transoft has already conducted a PathFinder Project in order to analyse the migration and assess the scope and complexities of the project. It also meant a firm cost for the project could be provided up front.

"We chose Transoft for this complex and demanding migration as it had both the technical expertise to convert our OpenVMS applications to Windows and also its well established migration methodology", said Martin Heaton, Control Systems Development Manager of Springfields Fuels.

Geoff Baker, managing director of Transoft, commented, “We are delighted to have been chosen for this high profile project and it further consolidates Transoft’s position as the premier OpenVMS migration company. More and more companies with mature mission critical applications on older platforms view migration as the most cost effective and least risk replacement option.”

With the replacement of the VAX OpenVMS with Windows, Springfields Fuels will be able to maintain the system in a single programming language, and will also have a modern Oracle database rather than the proprietary Rdb database. This should also reduce their operating costs and provide greater reliability for the future.