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Availability Award winner NYCE processes 1.5 billion transactions a year on NonStop systems
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| NYCE has a lot to be proud of.
Not only is it one of the largest
regional electronic funds transfer
(EFT) networks in the United States,
but it also sets the benchmark for
system availability in the EFT industry.
In fact, the International HP
NonStop Users Group (ITUG) voted
NYCE the hands-down winner of
its prestigious Availability Award at
the 2003 ITUG Summit. (See “ITUG
Availability Award” sidebar.) |
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“We give a lot of data center tours
to our clients,” said Brian Mecca,
director of data center operations at
NYCE Corporation. “At the first
place we stop, right when you
come into the office, our ITUG
award is hanging on the wall. That’s
where we tell people about our
overall system availability—from
the HP desktops, HP Atalla network
security processors, HP ProLiant
servers, and other vendor equipment,
all the way up to our HP
NonStop systems. It’s a highlight of
our tour.”
NYCE achieves superior availability
and management of its computing
environment through rigorous
problem and change management,
quality assurance, and benchmark
testing. “We apply this philosophy
all the way down the line,” added
Mecca. “We even do change control
for PC upgrades in our command
center; we use the same processes
for simple, routine, mundane tasks
as if we were replacing a CPU on
the NonStop system.”
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NYCE processes over 1.5 billion
transactions a year, occasionally hitting
peaks of more than 135 transactions
per second. These are full monetary
transactions, consisting of many
parts. A transaction begins from an
ATM or retailer POS terminal where
the consumer uses an NYCE card to
request cash, the current balance, a
funds transfer, or the purchase of
goods or services; it is then routed to
the appropriate financial institution
to verify funding; finally, it is sent
back through to the terminal initiation
point. All these steps comprise
a single transaction, even though
the request traverses the switch
multiple times.
According to Mecca, NYCE’s
primary business goal is outstanding
customer service. “We want to
make sure that we’re always there
for our customers,” he said. “When
people go to an ATM, supermarket,
or any type of retail store where
they can use their NYCE debit cards,
they expect the cards to work.
Customer service is paramount, and
that’s why system availability is so
critical to us.” |
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| NYCE relies on two separate
NonStop systems to handle its
mission-critical online transaction
processing (OLTP) applications. “We
have our NYCE Network platform,
which runs on an independent
NonStop system node,” explained
Mecca. “This is our primary switch-to-switch system. Financial institutions,
retailers, and independent
ATM deployers that own and
drive their own ATM/POS devices
connect to it; in turn, it connects
to other authorization endpoints. Third-party processors that drive
terminals and manage card authorization
systems for their clients also
connect to our NYCE Network Switch.”
Mecca continued, “Our other
NonStop server is a data processing
services platform known as the
EFT platform. This system is used to
provide data processing services to
clients, including card authorization,
card issuance management systems,
offline debit, ATM terminal driving,
and monitoring.”
The NYCE Network node is an
eight-processor NonStop S74000
server with 2 gigabytes of memory
per CPU and 24 mirrored 8-gigabyte
disk drives. The EFT processing
platform consists of a six-processor
NonStop S74000 server, also with
24 RAID-1 mirrored drives. High
Availability Backup for the NYCE
Network platform—a real-time vaulting
system based on DRNet, which
provides a near real-time copy of
each and every transaction off-site
and allows for a quick and complete
recovery—is handled by a major
disaster recovery provider. The EFT
terminal driving system is backed
up to magnetic tape, which is stored
off-site for recovery at the same
disaster recovery provider.
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If fail-safe system availability is
NYCE’s primary business challenge,
a close second is the company’s
commitment to providing service
for value. “People want good service,
but they also want a competitive
price,” said Mecca. “We need to
operate cost-effectively, and the
NonStop systems help us do this.
NonStop servers deliver excellent
return on investment, because you
don’t have to invest heavily in thirdparty
software to make the system
run efficiently. What’s more, we can
manage our NonStop systems with
a relatively small support staff.
Overall, I consider the total cost of
ownership for NonStop systems to be
much lower than any other system
would be, from a software, hardware,
and maintenance standpoint.”
NYCE leases its NonStop servers
through HP Financial Services, an
arrangement that Mecca has found
quite satisfactory. “
First of all, it’s
one-stop shopping" he explained.
"HP Financial Services works very
well with the rest of the HP sales
organization, which gives us flexibility
in financing the system creatively. Also, if we want to upgrade the system
during the term of the lease, it's
much easier to work things out
when the leasing company is owned
by the same company that supplies
the equipment.
"For example," continued Mecca,
"when we migrated from the NonStop
K-series to S-series platform, we had
around 25 different leases with
different lease-term expirations. We
sat down with HP Financial Services
and made all the leases co-terminus
on one date, for a very reasonable
rate. Basically, everything was rolled
into a single lease, making it a pleasant
buying experience." As a captive
leasing organization, HP Financial
Services has an extensive understanding
of HP's equipment roadmap
and market value; therefore, it can take
a high residual position and provide
customers with very favorable rates.
HP's customer support and sales
organizations comprise another
important part of the solution. "The
customer engineering folks are
great," Mecca commented. "They
perform preventive maintenance
once a month to make sure everything
is going okay. If we have an
issue and want them to come on-site,
they're always there for us. That
includes NYCE's monthly meetings
to review the hardware reports and
status for the past month. The HP
sales group also attends to address
any issues, and provides periodic
product development updates."
NYCE systems run software from a
number of key vendors. The company's
primary application for terminal
driving and switching of monetary
transactions is eFunds CONNEX,
although it also runs ACI BASE24.
PROGNOSIS is used for system monitoring,
and ICE runs the IBM SNA
protocol. With its Concourse-ESP
settlement software, Baldwin Hackett
& Meeks is a new solutions provider
for Everlink (a joint venture in
Canada between NYCE and Celero).
Concourse-ESP takes a real-time feed
and continuously processes the
transactions into an SQL database,
making it possible to view settlement
positions throughout the day, as
well as creating traditional end-of-day
reports. |
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ITUG Availability Award
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Winning the ITUG Availability Award
brings immediate and tangible rewards,
including a handsome trophy for display
in the corporate lobby and a year’s worth
of bragging rights about a well-managed
IT shop. More importantly, it demonstrates
a sustained commitment to the
use of best practices in minimizing system
outages. The award is presented each
year at the International HP NonStop
Users Group (ITUG) Summit.
The ITUG Availability Award program
offers other important benefits as well:
ITUG members gain relevant and practical
information when award winners elaborate
on their methodology at the following year’s
Summit. And the NonStop Enterprise
Division (NED) availability team gets a
better view of life in the real world,
through visibility into entrants’ complete
outage picture, rather than the subset
of outages typically reported to HP
support centers.
Consistent, accurate measurement provides
a solid basis for improvement, and
the ITUG Availability Award scrutinizes a
broad range of measurements: outage
minutes sustained, configuration and
operational complexity, rate of configuration
change, and quality of outage data.
A detailed assessment of entrants’ best
practices also figures into the award
criteria. NYCE Corporation and other winners
of this prestigious award have good reason
to be proud of their accomplishment.
Brian Mecca, NYCE, with ITUG Availability Award |
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| Linear scalability is another critical
NonStop system feature for NYCE.
“In a single-node environment, the
systems can scale up to 16 processors,”
said Mecca. “With the
NonStop S-series technology—and
the fact that the CPUs are basically
plug and play—you can go from a
NonStop S74000 server to a NonStop
S86000 server without replacing the
infrastructure and enclosures. If we
were to double or triple our volume
tomorrow, for example, NYCE could
just wheel in more CPUs and configure
them online. The eFunds
application would be able to balance
the extra processes across the CPUs
without any downtime, through
online database changes.”
Down the road, Mecca sees
potential for HP’s Zero Latency
Enterprise (ZLE) architecture within
NYCE’s data center. “To me, ZLE is a
concept,” he stated. “The concept
that HP is putting forward is: ‘'Bring
us a problem, and we’ll solve it.’ If
you have 10 disparate databases in
10 different locations, and 100 different
end users, HP can create a ZLE architecture
to tie them all together in real
time. When somebody updates one
database, the other nine are automatically
populated, and the updated
information is immediately accessible
across the enterprise.”
When it comes to capturing the
overriding benefit of NonStop systems
for NYCE, Brian Mecca waxes
eloquent. “In the ever-changing and
expanding world of electronic funds
transfer, NYCE’s ability to be an
Adaptive Enterprise is supported by
our business relationship with HP
and its scalable, indestructible
NonStop computing technology,” he
concluded. “NYCE’s vision is to be
the best real-time payments company,
and HP NonStop technology is a key
ally in this effort.”
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