Alaric's Authentic lets banks modernize legacy payment systems

Alaric International, headquartered in London, has announced benchmarking results for its Authentic product, a component of Oracle's Consumer Payments Services Hub (CPSH) solution set. According to the company, the CPSH enables retail banks and service providers to progressively modernize legacy payments systems such as for ATM and POS while enhancing business agility and competitive edge, increasing profitability, reducing operational costs and expanding existing customer relationships. Its high performance also supports the new types of files and transactions, such as check images and mobile payments, eliminating the need for separate infrastructures.

Alaric's Authentic uses the latest Oracle technology and hardware to help ensure the performance and quality of service capabilities of production-ready Authentic configurations. The benchmark was completed within the context of a formally structured, Oracle-managed process.

Oracle Real Application Clusters was used to achieve high database availability within a site and Oracle GoldenGate was used to offload real-time transactional reporting to a reporting database and to implement active-active database configuration while supporting a 100 million cardholder database for authorizations. Oracle GoldenGate delivers real-time data integration and transactional replication between heterogeneous systems, enabling continuous data availability and decision making with timely data.

Authentic was running on five of Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 application servers (each powered by two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors and 32 GB of memory) and Oracle Database 11g with Oracle Real Application Clusters running on Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers (each with twelve SPARC64 VII processors and 192 GB of memory). Using Oracle's solution, based on best-of-breed components, Alaric's Authentic recorded throughput of 10,864 transactions per second with an average response time of 200 milliseconds.

All Sun SPARC Enterprise servers used in this configuration ran on Oracle Solaris 10, a leading enterprise operating system, to provide the best possible performance, and with the addition of Oracle GoldenGate to enable bi-directional replication between two active-active sites simulated as being 800 miles apart, the system delivered a sustained throughput of 9,348 transactions per second without degradation of response times.

Authentic says these results demonstrate that its solution can scale to meet the performance and availability/QoS requirements of the largest institution or processor and that the CPSH provides a powerful single platform which can be deployed to consolidate multiple, disparate, legacy payment silos, if so desired.

"This benchmark establishes both the performance and the integration of the Oracle hardware and software components. We are confident that CPSH offers financial institutions more than just a switch replacement. Banks can use the integration of these components to deliver a payments infrastructure with the flexibility to meet changing market requirements," said Andrea Klein, vice president, global financial services, Oracle.

Alaric is a Gold level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, and is working with Oracle to deliver the highly configurable Consumer Payments Services Hub to the financial services community through a network of strategic systems integrators complementing the existing Alaric delivery and support network.