Press release

September 28, 2005

Moscow, September 28, 2005 — HP and BPC (Banking Production Centre) announced the successful completion of BPC’s SmartVista processing solution benchmark tests on the HP hardware platform. The testing was conducted from August 29 to September 9 at HP Customer Visit Centre, Böblingen, Germany. These tests appeared to be the first large scale SmartVista trial in major stress environment created by HP testing laboratory. The level of the tests was unprecedented for the Russian market of processing solutions.

The benchmark study was performed using a wide range of HP hardware solutions:

• HP Superdome Server: 64 CPUs РА-8800, 252 GB of main memory, HP-UX 11i v2 operating system;
• HP XP12000 Disk Array: 15 TB RAID 0/1 storage;
• 21 Work Stations: 6 PCs Pentium IV (3.0 GHz., 512 MB of main memory, Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, Service Pack 4) and 15 HP ProLiant Servers DL380G3 (2 XEON CPUs, 3,6 GHz, 4 GB of main memory, Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, Service Pack 4).

The cryptographic equipment used in the tests comprised 6 ProtectHost White PL1200 host security modules (HSMs) supplied by BPC’s partner Eracom Technologies. During the tests DBMS Oracle 9.2.0.6 was used for data mining and processing.

The benchmark testing was performed on the basis of a full-functional production version of SmartVista software suite comprising SmartVista Front-End switching system and SmartVista Back-Office card management system. During the tests a mix of transactions was generated from different locations, including cash withdrawal via ATMs and POS-terminals, retail purchases, e-commerce, balance inquiry, as well as application processing.

The stress tests of SmartVista Front-End system simulated a workload of 100 financial institutions, 10 000 ATMs, 100 000 POS-terminals and 10 000 000 cards. This configuration was modeling the production operation of a multi-branch financial organization, acting as MSP/TPP, or of a processing centre of national scale.

The benchmark study enabled BPC’s engineers to ascertain the peak throughput the system could perform, determine the level of CPU utilization under imitated workload. All that experience will be essentially important for further development of the solution scalability and architecture optimization. The results of the test showed that SmartVista was capable of processing up to 1 200 transactions per second, while supporting the sustained throughput of 800 tps. Average CPU consumption during the peak volumes was less then 50%.

The tests have demonstrated the ability of SmartVista solution to repeatedly and consistently handle large transaction volumes encountered in today‘s retail banking environment. Besides, the tests have proved the efficiency of SmartVista integration with Eracom’s HSM HostProtect White, that resulted from the ongoing cooperation between BPC and Eracom Technologies.

SmartVista benchmark study has clearly indicated that BPC’s flagship processing system combined with the outstanding features of HP hardware solutions can provide the power to meet the transaction processing throughput requirements of the most demanding retail banks, while keeping up with their aggressive growth and delivering capacity to accommodate vast increases in transactions volume.