‘No Scalability Limits’ Shown with Fiserv Power7 Benchmark

November 29, 2011 Alex Woodie

A very impressive benchmark of Fiserv‘s IBM i-based Premiere core banking application was recently conducted at an IBM Innovation Center in San Mateo, California. The relatively low usage of Power7 resources during the test led the companies to conclude that “there’s no known limit to Premier’s scalability.”

IBM and Fiserv loaded Premiere on a four-core Power Systems Model 750 platform equipped with solid state drives and rated for 24,000 CPW. In that configuration, Premier was able to support more than 5.1 million online transactions processing (OLTP) per hour (including customer and account inquiries), which is a record for the software.

The average response time during the benchmark (which was based on data supplied by a real Premier customer) was 0.056 seconds. The average CPU usage during the benchmark was 40 percent, and average disk usage was 9 percent. These OLTP numbers are consistent with a Premier customer handling about 200 million accounts.

Batch workload performance was even more impressive, with throughput exceeding 6.1 million accounts per hour when processing various (and demanding, according to IBM) batch workloads on databases consisting of 1 million, 2 million, and 4 million accounts. Average CPU usage during the batch benchmark was 31 percent, and average disk usage was 23 percent.

Consider that these high throughputs were achieved on a modest four-core Power 750 server. What would Premier achieve on a 256-core Power 795 with upwards of a million CPW be able to achieve?

IBM pondered a variation of this question. “The relatively low usage of POWER7 resources associated with these record-shattering benchmark results,” IBM writes in its Solution Brief, “shows that there’s no known limit to Premier’s scalability. There’s no question that larger test databases and POWER7 configurations could yield even higher levels of throughput while delivering outstanding user experience and batch efficiencies.”

The shattered benchmark led Dave Wegman, senior vice president and head of Premier Solutions for Bank Solutions, to say: “By choosing IBM Power Systems, financial institutions can expect Premier to not only accommodate but surpass the processing requirements of a bank with even the most aggressive and successful growth-oriented strategy. Fiserv can confidently advise clients that Premier can scale to meet the requirements of a financial institution of almost any size.”

You can read the entire Premier Solution brief at www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/stg_ast_sys_fiserv_on_ibm_power7.