Operational systems are designed to support Transaction Processing whereas Data Warehouse systems are designe to support  Online analytical Processing

Operational Systems

• It supports high volume transaction processing with minmal reporting
• Process oriented. Usually focused on specific business processes or tasks
• Generally concerned with the Current data
• These systems are generally updated regularily 
• Optimized to perform fast inserts and updates of small volume of data
• These are application specific, non-integrated systems and contains redundant data.

Historical Systems

• It supports high volume analytical processing and supports report generation
• Subject oriented. Subject areas are usually populated from one or more operational systems
• Generally concerned with the historical data
• It is non-volatile, that means new data may be added regulaily but once data is loaded , the data is changed rarely. 
• Optimized to perform fast retrievals of large volume of data
• These are Integrated systems, to avoid data redundancy problems.