Comprehensive operating system strategy

Orion has been using the Windows 7 Professional edition as its operating system that has been able to support its 64-bit CPU. This OS has provided Orion Co. with Windows Anytime upgrade features so that they can upgrade and unlock features of any OS they chose. This professional version of Windows 7 has provided with features like encrypting file system, software restriction policies, remote desktop server location, backup to a network location, support up to 192 Gb of RAM, and so on.

Orion Co. is using Windows 7 Professional edition that uses a single-core processor (AMD K) for carrying out the instruction. The OS has helped Orion Co. to make computational calculations and logical decision making. Lately, Orion Co. has been facing several problems with its operating system like overheating, slacking performance, and excessive power consumption. As Orion Co. try to increase their clock speed, the heat generated by the chip of OS is significantly increasing. Thus, the problem of freezing occurs whenever several instructions are provided to the operating system.

Orion Corporation has been growing significantly which also signifies the increase in the number of transactions made and website use. This means more pressure is put on the current single-core operating system to carry out several instructions at a time.

The author proposes the use of a dual-core operating system (Intel Core i7) for Orion Corporation which will eliminate most of the current problems faced by the company and increase efficiency. A dual-core operating system will be able to enhance the performance of OS as information or instruction is divided into multiple units and multiple processors will execute the instructions simultaneously. Thus, multiple requests or instructions can be carried out eliminating the problem system freezing. It will be beneficial when multithreading or using multiple applications of office suites. Likewise, the use of multiple core operating systems will be cost-efficient as it uses shared resources like peripheral and memory and due to the less cost for cooling. Overall, the proposal of a dual-core operating system would be beneficial for Orion Corporation.

We need to understand and identify the best processor for our computer to upgrade our processor and core. Since, Orion Corporation has been using dell desktops with Windows 7 OS (AMD K6 processor), upgrading it to Windows 10 OS with Intel Core i7 is recommended.

The following steps need to be followed while choosing to upgrade the processor and core:

Step 1: Identify and understand the motherboard and processor and select the processor or core that is compatible with the motherboard.

Step 2: Identify the motherboard model using the command prompt to find basic information about the computer motherboard. “Use the following command in the command prompt: wmic baseboard get the product, manufacturer, version, serial number.” (Jenic, 1)

Step 3: Determining processor socket type used by the motherboard by entering the motherboard name, model number, socket, and chipset in the search engine.

Step 4: Purchasing the processor or core that matches the motherboard. We can purchase a processor or core depending upon the price, compatibility, and computational needs.

Step 5: Installing the new compatible processor by turning off the computer, removing the side panel and locating the motherboard, removing the current heat sink and processor and replacing it with a new one, plugin the heat sink and new processor, reassemble all the part and restart the computer.

The system requirement to update the Windows 10 OS for Orion Corporation’s dell laptops are:

· Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC

· RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit

· Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS or 20 GB for 64-bit OS

· Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver

· Display: 800 x 600

Orion Corporation has 25 locations over Colorado and will be maintain all their transaction in a virtualized environment. The main server would be in the head office of Denver which would partition the physical server to several virtual servers by using virtualization software. These virtual environments would be on all 25 locations and working independently.

Orion corporation would be using a single server that would run on Windows operating system. Since, Orion co. has several locations and would be doing transaction thousands of time a day, they want to maintain uniformity across all their locations, they would be working on a virtual environment. The company would be using server virtualization which would include storage virtualization, network virtualization, and workload management. The working in virtualized environment will help Orion Co. to cut down the cost by the efficient use of resources (not over or underutilization of servers and hardware), distribute workloads across virtual machines which would improve the turnaround and response time.

Orion Corporation has decided to use First Come First Serve (FCFS) and Round Robin scheduling algorithm for their business. Orion has chosen these two-scheduling algorithms based upon the decision mode, throughput, starvation, response time, effect of process and overhead of scheduling algorithm. The scheduling algorithms has been briefly described below:

First Come First Serve (FCFS):

The FCFS scheduling algorithm is a simple concept where the first in the line is served first no matter what priority is held by the task. In other words, the scheduler in FCFS executes the process in the order they are submitted to the processor. The benefits and challenges of using FCFS in Orion Corporation has been listed below:

Benefits:

· FCFS is better for long process because we do not have to switch CPU often. Once, the CPU has been allocated it would permit the process no matter what time it consumes.

· It is simple method, easy to implement, and minimum overhead on processes due to few movements of processes.

· There will be no starvation as it gives equal priority to all the task. Thus, task or process with low priority do not have to wait to be executed.

Challenges:

· The primary effect of FCFS is the convey effect that means smaller process have to wait for a long time if they are behind the long process.

· The average wait time, response time is poor compared to other scheduling algorithm and it also penalizes the short processes or input output bound processes.

Round Robin:

A Round Robin scheduling algorithm is the most popular and preemptive version of FCFS where time quantum is allocated to each process. In other words, a certain time is allocated to every process which would be executes in cyclic way. The benefits and challenges of Round Robin scheduling algorithm has been listed below:

Benefits:

· Since RR does not depend upon the time burst, it is implementable and effective in the transaction processing system, time sharing system, and general-purpose system.

· There is fair treatment for all processes as CPU is allocated to all processes for a certain time quantum.

· It is beneficial for short processes due to excellent response time.

· The resources are utilized in a balanced order, there is no starvation, and the overhead is also minimum.

Challenges:

· There may be the context switching overhead due to time quantum. If there is a long process and the quantum time is insufficient, the process will go back to the queue and must wait again for other process to execute.

· Determination of time quantum is critical because if its is too short, it causes frequent content switching lowering the CPU efficiency and if its too long, it causes poor response time for short interactive process.

· The process with long burst time may be starved.

Enterprise Environment:

Orion Corporation has decided to work on a distributed operating system environment. Across 25 locations, several POS and computers would be interconnected using a shared communication network (LAN network). The main office server would be responsible for overlooking all the branch office network, server, and the CPU. The reason Orion Corporation has chosen to work on distributed environment is that it is possible for users to get access to files which are not present in their branch system but on some other branch system using the shared communication network. This will allow remote access to devices like computers and POS connected within the network and would be beneficial when one of the system goes down as there is always another system they can be used while the broken one is under maintenance.

Since Orion Corporation is a grocery chain, they would be using hundreds of POS and computers / CPUs. If one of the POS within the network fail, it will not affect the other POS / system as they are independent to each other. Likewise, resources would be shared which will allows fast and durable computation, workload on host POS would be reduced, and its scalability feature allows to increase or decrease the number of POS or system in the network.

Semaphore Concurrency Mechanism:

Concurrency is bound to happen in Orion Corporation’s system as hundreds of people would be using POS at any given time that means several POS would be competing for resources like process time to access I/O devices or a memory block of main memory. Issues like deadlock, live-lock, race condition, and starvation may arise which could be solved with a proper concurrency mechanism.

It is suggested Orion Corporation to adopt semaphore concurrency mechanism to manage the concurrent processes in our shared main memory. Semaphore uses integer value to signal among processes. We can perform three operation using the semaphore concurrency mechanism i.e. initialization (given non-integer value), increment for unblocking of process, and decrement for blocking of the process. The primitive semiSignal (s) would be used to transmit the signal, semiWait (s) would be used to receive the signal, and if no signal is transmitted the process will be suspended in a semaphore concurrency mechanism.

Initially the semaphore is initialized to a no- negative value. Then the semiWait operation will decrease the value of semaphore. If the semaphore value become anything other than negative, it continues the execution of process otherwise the process execution is blocked. Likewise, the semiSignal operation will increase the value of semaphore. If the semaphore value becomes zero or less than zero, the process execution is blocked by semiWait operation, and anything else is unblocked. Thus, it will help to solve the concurrency problem in Orion Corporation’s operating system.