Published on December 22, 2010
Chennai : Polaris Software, a leading Financial Technology company, today announced performance report findings for Polaris’ IntellectTM Cards, which prove its ability to successfully support peak business volumes on existing infrastructure, meeting industry expectations. The research was jointly conducted by IBM Systems and Technology Group ISV Enablement and Polaris Software Lab Ltd.
The testing environment, created to reflect real-world transaction activity per card per month, was made up of 10 million cards with 12 million transaction volumes. In line with the daily production runs, transaction data for a period of 29 days were loaded and processed in a single run followed by an end of day process along with billing cycle run.
The platform used, comprising of the following configuration:
• One physical IBM POWER6 550 server with 8 cores and 64 GB RAM was made into two logical partitions (LPARs). Each LPAR was allocated 4 cores, 32 GB RAM and 1 X 4 GB fiber channel
• One IBM POWER5+ 550 server with 8 cores and 32 GB RAM was used as the end of day batch server
• One POWER5+ 510 server with 2 cores and 8 GB RAM was used as the authorization server
• One IBM System Storage® DS4800 storage area network (SAN) with 14×146 GB 15000 rpm FC Disks used as common storage for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)
The scenario called for the platform to process 275 online authorization transactions per second (TPS) during the peak period of the day and an end of day time window of maximum 8 hours for processing 10 Million credit cards
The project was undertaken by a joint team from Polaris and IBM, in the IBM performance testing facility in IBM, Bangalore. The benchmarking was undertaken with an objective of testing the application on a suite of industrial benchmark circuits to ensure that it provides estimable performance parameters and to identify the potential areas of additional performance improvements.
The tests were executed multiple times, using the same data volume and load conditions with certain maintenance in terms of database level, addition of indexes, change in query (to reduce the cost of query and to get a better execution plan), leading to the final testing run where the desired timing was achieved. Certain run time parameters, such as number of parallel processes, were also adjusted so as to utilize the processor completely without saturating the database.
According to the report1 titled ‘Measuring Intellect Cards performance on IBM Power Systems and IBM AIX’, “Performance testing and benchmarking of an application certifies the performance of the product, indicating the scope for further enhancement and fine tuning of the application.”
Speaking on the occasion Manish Maakan, Global Head, Retail Banking, Polaris Software, said, “We are very excited about IBM’s benchmarking of the IntellectTM Card Platform. The test results further confirm the platform’s ability to comfortably support the high density peak volumes and operational needs for banks globally. This is a testimony to our long term vision and commitment of delivering the most efficient banking solutions to global banks as well as financial institutions.”