CTL Puts its Latest Solution to a High-Volume Test

The results of the test offer CTL and its clients useful metrics that indicate hardware requirements and performance expectations when running PRIME with card volumes both greater and smaller than the ten million on which the test was conducted. CTL consultants planned and oversaw the test. They put pressure on specific areas of system functionality to assess the strength of its new design and its interaction with the Oracle 9i database. The test covered credit card and merchant processing functions, risk management, customer service user access, and data archiving and purging. With back and front office processes running simultaneously, the test revealed a tightly integrated suite of products. The system, which ran HP-UX 11i on Itanium processors with less than 1TB disk arrays, posted transactions, both from clearing files and for payments, at a rate of more than 475 per second; and from a POS file at 250 per second. It processed 5,000 collection accounts per second and generated statements, with interest and fee calculations, at a rate of 180 per second. Following the system test, CTL says it will use the intelligence it gathered to further its research and development programme, and to add value to the consultancy it offers.