Jan 17, 2013, 2:05pm

Compass Plus, a company specialising in electronic payment solutions and retail banking systems, has successfully completed scalability and performance tests on HP servers for their new Open Development Banking Platform - TranzAxis. TranzAxis is a specialist, integrated platform created for the development and support of cards and payments, transaction switching, retail banking and other systems and applications in the domain linked to the automation of retail banking activities.

The benchmark testing was aimed at determining TranzAxis’ key performance indicators in various scenarios. TranzAxis was tested through a simulated issuing and acquiring setup that required it to drive 20,000 terminals (10,000 ATMs and 10,000 POS devices). TranzAxis also acted as an issuing system that included 10 million accounts with overdrafts and 10 million cards linked to them. The tests included both real-time transaction processing and batch processing.

All terminals worked continuously in full emulation mode with limit checks, commission calculations, performance of full authorization, authentication of cardholders, etc. TranzAxis reached a sustained peak of 1066 transactions per second (TPS) during testing and remained stable at that high capacity. All transactions that were included in these results were actual business transactions. This figure does not include all database transactions and only counts an action that a customer would have carried out (for example, cash withdrawal or a POS payment would be considered as one transaction).

The benchmark results also demonstrated that TranzAxis is capable of processing (balancing) 10 million current accounts with overdrafts, including interest and commission calculation, at a rate of 1500 TPS. The scanning and balancing of all the accounts in the portfolio took three hours on a statement date and one hour in the middle of the month. The account balancing procedure reassesses the state of the contracts, manages delinquency statuses, does postings (if required), calculates provisions, etc.

Compass Plus is one of only a few vendors that stress tests its systems by modeling real life production use and employing various issuing and acquiring data volumes, as opposed to standard performance testing. This is the only method that demonstrates how the system will behave in a variety of real life situations and enables Compass Plus to offer an optimal system and hardware configuration dependent on customer requirements, helping users reduce costs.

Performed remotely with a team from the HP Partner Technology Access Centre in London over a five week period, the testing was carried out on HP ProLiant DL980 G7 servers with 8 Intel Xeon E7-4870, 2.4 GHz, 80 core processors, configured with 512 GB of RAM.

“Software vendors are always offering statistics for TPS, throwing around large numbers without accounting for what they class a transaction as or how their test system was actually configured,” said Maria Nottingham, CMO at Compass Plus. “Both Compass Plus and HP are delighted with the performance results from the testing, especially as they show the actual number of business transactions performed on a test system close to a real-life production system. These results clearly demonstrate that TranzAxis performs at a high level on such servers as HP ProLiant DL980 G7.”

About HP ProLiant DL980 G7 servers

HP ProLiant DL980 G7, featuring HP's PREMA Architecture delivers the balanced scaling, self-healing resiliency and breakthrough efficiency needed to overcome the challenges of today's most demanding x86 compute environments. Whether implementing a single and very large data intensive, or many consolidated or virtualized workloads, the DL980 G7 server is an ideal platform to deploy and scale up Enterprise environments.

About Compass Plus

Compass Plus provides comprehensive, integrated and flexible payment software and services that help financial institutions meet rapidly changing market demands. Our diverse customer base spans retail banks, processing centres, national switches and personalisation centres in dozens of countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, North and South America. With almost 20 years experience, Compass Plus helps build and manage electronic payment systems that generate new revenues and improve profits for its customers.