WAY4 Switch, OpenWay's switching system for card payments transactions, has demonstrated a record performance of 3000 business transactions per second on a Sun6900/Oracle platform. To date, it is one of the highest performance indicators for card payment transaction switching systems run on an open platform.
WAY4 Switch is a high-speed, round-clock available system based on a flexible product and transaction framework. This combination makes the system attractive for large banks, processors, and telecommunication companies planning to invest in new-generation transaction switching systems.
3000 business transactions per second (TPS) is the official performance indicator set by WAY4 Switch on a Sun 6900/Oracle 10g platform during a major benchmarking exercise conducted at the Sun Microsystems Benchmark Centre in Langen. 3000 business TPS is one of the highest performance indicators for transaction switching systems run on an open platform.
Today, many companies look for new IT solutions to support the growing business that allows them to quickly create new products and services while optimizing processes and cutting operational costs.
However, the assumption was that new-generation systems were incapable of supporting high volumes when they ranged into tens of millions of cards and thousands of transactions per second.
How does WAY4 enable companies to reach high performance levels while simultaneously maintaining a complex set of rule-based functionalities?
As Wim Pardon, Director of OpenWay Belgium, explains: "First, it is the unique architecture of the WAY4 Core that supports Switch, CMS, and EMV Personalisation on a single platform. Secondly, we are constantly perfecting the system through benchmark testing in our laboratories. And last but not least, it is our on-hands experience in real-life implementations.
Pieter Heyn, Sun's Global Strategy Manager for Banking commented: "Customers are increasingly migrating their payment transaction systems to open, standards-based platforms for cost, performance and flexibility reasons. This benchmark result provides customers with compelling evidence of the combined strength of OpenWay's WAY4 framework and Sun's Solaris 10-based platforms. We have been most impressed with the performance of the OpenWay product and look forward to working closely with their team on joint opportunities."
Already, our clients are processing volumes of 11 million or more debit and credit cards on a single WAY4 platform. Our next target is 50 million cards and 10,000 business TPS.
By enabling complex request exchanges in various dialects such as ISO8583, NDC/DDC, XML/IFX and others, WAY4 Switch gives clients access to products and services from various back-office systems and billing systems through ATM, POS, Kiosk, Web, IVR, and mobile banking, as well as Visa, MasterCard, American Express payment networks, and other channels.
Authorisation and authentication, online risk management, channel and request monitoring, transaction tracking and other functions are included in the WAY4 Switch infrastructure.
Distributed application architecture, the reliability of the Sun hardware platform, and Unix/ORACLE clusters all contribute to a highly reliable, scalable solution capable of handling high transaction volumes 24x7.
In the Langen benchmark exercise, the platform configuration consisted of multiple SF6900 and SFT 2000 domains, hosting WAY4, Oracle and application server instances.
Transaction generators simulated 20 acquirer sites as transaction sources and 20 issuer sites as transaction destinations. A mix of various types of credit and debit transactions, originating from various channels, such as ATM, POS or e-gateway, was generated during the tests. Over 1 million transactions were generated for each test case, with individual transactions consisting of two messages: ISO8583 0100 request and 0110 response.
Each real-time financial transaction was defined as a complete business transaction cycle involving an authorisation request with complete online fraud monitoring and corporate hierarchical credit/risk checking including commission, VAT and fee calculations.
WAY4T demonstrated a stable performance of close to 3000 authorisation TPS with an 80% Oracle 10g database server load (SF6900 domain with 8 CPU) and a 20-50% application servers load (2 SF6900 domains with 4 CPU and SFT2000 domain with 1 CPU).
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