Compass
Plus, a company specialising in electronic payment solutions and retail banking
systems has successfully completed scalability and performance tests on IBM System
z™ environment for TranzWare Online and TranzWare CMS. TranzWare Online
is a highly efficient, fault-tolerant engine for the switching, parametric
routing and authorisation of electronic payment transactions along with an
array for cutting-edge supporting functionalities. It is complemented with
TranzWare CMS – a feature-rich comprehensive banking solution providing the
tools to enable the efficient operation and management of card issuance and
lifecycle, bank and merchant acquiring with a range of retail banking features.
The IBM System z platform is uniquely positioned as the management hub at the
heart of the enterprise computing environment, efficiently and securely
handling mission-critical, complex and intense application and processing
requirements. System z delivers large scale consolidation capabilities for
savings of up to 80% in total cost of ownership compared to distributed
platforms.
The extensive testing took place from 19th April until 11th
May 2010 at z Benchmark, IBM Products and Solutions Services Centre,
Montpellier (France). The testing was carried out on a z10 server hardware
model E64 with 64 GCP configured with 384 GB of RAM.
The benchmark set under the conditions of real life
production use clearly demonstrated that TranzWare CMS is capable of running
all end-of-month procedures in less than 8 hours for at least 10 million active
credit cards (all having a single billing cycle, i.e. all end-of-month
processing for them occurring on one day). Six months worth of live transaction
data and associated batch procedures as ran by the issuers during the course of
production use were thoroughly emulated for this test. The system contained ten
different types of revolving credit card products (in TranzWare CMS notation -
contracts) with each contract generating four card transactions with issuer
fees and commission calculation using different algorithms, one credit
repayment transaction, two contract settlement operations on Due Day and
Statement Day – all taking place monthly during the 6 month period. In
addition, the system was tested using different sets of data (for example,
overdue/non-overdue accounts, active/blocked cards, etc).
For the purpose of TranzWare Online stress testing, a test
processing system containing a database of 100 million customers, accounts and
cards respectively was created. Several application servers were used to
simulate up to 54,000 terminals connected via different protocols per each
device type (15,000 ATMs, 39,000 POS). The transactions tested included ATM transactions
(Cash Withdrawal – 85% and Balance Inquiry – 15%) and POS Purchase
transactions. All terminals worked in full emulation mode with limit checks,
commission calculations, performance of full authorisation in Stand-in mode,
authentication of cardholders, etc; also all ATMs were monitored by the system
in full online mode.
Under the conditions of real life production use testing,
460 TPS were achieved with the average authorisation time in system peak load
of 5 seconds for the POS transactions and 2 seconds for the ATM transactions.
The maximum number of logical transactions achieved was 6,000 TPS. During the
test no deviations in the system performance were recorded and the result
unequivocally proved that the TranzWare payment solution has the capability to
run on the Linux for System z environment, using Oracle Database Server 10.
Employing the methodology of stress testing the system by
modeling real life production use as opposed to straightforward transaction
switching is, in many respects, unique and is only performed by a handful
vendors. However, this is the only true test that expressly shows how the
system will fare in a real life situation.
Compass Plus and the IBM team were also able to run several
tests with different volumes of issuing and acquiring data, which showed how
the system behaves in various situations. This is especially useful in project
management whereby Compass Plus will be able to better forecast server hardware
requirements thus, saving costs for the new customers that state their business
plans over the next few years.
Olga Demina, the Senior Vice President, CBDO & Global
Sales Director of Compass Plus said of the project: “Banking and payment
industries are being driven by customer expectations, tough competition and
tightening regulations to provide impeccable and secure service 24x7 365 days a
year - this doesn't come cheap or easy and requires enterprise-grade solutions
to deliver at the appropriate level. We trust System z is the solution for such
challenges. The benchmark has demonstrated that System z not only is a good
choice for large scale credit card issuers, but it may be the only choice out
there for the largest of them. We believe this benchmark to be crucial for our
existing large scale customers who are considering platform upgrades to support
their business in the future at the necessary performance level without any
sacrifices of manageability and security.”
The level of professionalism offered by the Montpellier PSSC
Competency Center team during the benchmark and the analysis provided afterwards
will enable Compass Plus to improve the system further and extend the
performance record set this time by a fair margin. Building on the success
achieved in this project, Compass Plus is planning to engage the same
methodology in testing the new products of other leading vendors in the market.
Compass
Plus
