Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Software Maker Boosts Performance
400 Percent with Move to 64-bit Windows Computing
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Technology
Customer Profile
Redmond, Washington–based TPI Software LLC is a leading provider of innovative payment technologies for processing credit cards, debit/ATM cards, gift cards, and other payment services.
Business Situation
The company wanted to increase the performance of its Microsoft® Windows®–based TPI SmartPayments Server solution, while minimizing additional cost to its customers.
Solution
TPI Software upgraded its solution to support the 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Server™2003, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, and Microsoft Windows XP Professional software.
Benefits
Boosts performance 400 percent
Provides headroom for growth
Costs 20 percent as much as scaling out to a 32-bit system
Increases reliability / “By moving to the 64-bit version of SmartPayments Server on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server, we expect to increase performance by three to four times, for about 20 percent of the cost of scaling out our current infrastructure.”
Tracy Metzger, Chief Technology Officer, Abanco
TPI Software wanted to boost the performance of TPI SmartPayments Server, its electronic payment solution, while minimizing the cost of that greater performance to customers. Its solution: Upgrade SmartPayments Server to support the 64-bit versions of Microsoft® Windows Server™2003, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, and Microsoft Windows® XP Professional software. TPI accomplished the upgrade in just three days at Microsoft Labs, making what TPI Software describes as only minor adjustments to its application. By migrating from the 32-bit versions of Microsoft software, TPI has boosted performance 400 percent with 20 percent CPU utilization, giving its customers both faster performance and headroom to grow for years to come. A key customer estimates that its upgrade to the 64-bit solution will cost just 20 percent as much as scaling out to a 32-bit system to achieve the same performance.
Situation
Since its founding in 2001, TPI Software LLC has made a name for itself as a leading provider of innovative payment technologies for processing credit cards, debit/ATM cards, gift cards, electronic check services (verification, guarantee, and conversation), and electronic signature/receipt and check image-capture and retrieval services.
The company’s flagship solution is TPI SmartPayments Server, an electronic payment solution that supports the major U.S.payment processors. The software’s technology is an alternative to the stand-alone, single-function bank terminals that many businesses currently use to process payments. TPI SmartPayments Serverprovides a full suite of payment Web services that can be integrated into electronic commerce environments, mail order/telephone order (also know as MOTO), or retail point-of-sale systems, eliminating the need for separate systems and redundant data entry of transactions into both a dedicated payment-processing solution and the merchant’s own system.
TPI Software, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, based its solution on Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, the Microsoft .NET Framework, and Web services.
“Our use of the Windows Server System and .NET Framework has made it easy for us to deliver solutions to meet the needs of our customers,” says Andy Chau, Chief Technology Officer and Cofounder, TPI Software. “By exposing all of our transaction processing application programming interfaces—for example, credit card sale, debit card refund, and wire transfer—as Web services, we’ve made it easy for our customers to integrate their payment infrastructures and products with TPI SmartPayments Server quickly and cost-effectively.”
Beyond easy integration, the use of Windows Server System—including the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, Enterprise Edition database software—has also delivered high performance to TPI SmartPayments Server and its customers. In a test configuration with a pair of load-balanced SmartPayments Server computers connected to a computer running SQL Server, the solution processed 6 to 12 transactions per second and up to 43,000 transactions per hour.
As fast as that is, TPI Software’s customers continue to demand faster and more cost-effective performance, and the company is challenged to deliver it. For example, Abanco International uses TPI SmartPayments Server for its payment-processing solutions and, with business booming, Abanco needed a more powerful payments engine.
“We’re expecting to acquire several new, major customers over the next few months that could bring our daily transaction load up fivefold, to more than one million transactions per day,” says Tracy Metzger, Chief Technology Officer of Abanco. “What we wondered was whether our TPI SmartPayments Server could handle the amount of business we want to pass through it.”
Scaling out was an option—but a costly one, requiring more hardware servers, more software licenses, and more administrative overhead to manage them. Doubling the size of the deployment could cost another U.S.$200,000 for hardware and software. Metzger also estimated that Abanco would have to add another person to its two-person support staff dedicated to the TPI infrastructure, for another $50,000 in annual expense.
“What we wanted was a way to support much higher throughput while keeping the server model that already worked for us,” says Metzger. “We didn’t want more servers. We didn’t want more overhead. We just wanted more performance.”
And TPI Software wanted a way to meet the needs of Abanco and its other customers in similar situations.
Solution
TPI Software now is able to give Abanco and other customers the greater performance they want, without those customers having to alter their current server models, thanks to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition, the Microsoft Windows® XP Professional x64 Edition operating system, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise 64-bit Edition. TPI received pre-release versions of the Windows software as a participant in Microsoft’s Ascend program.
TPI announced its support for 64-bit Microsoft software in December 2004, running its SmartPayments Server on both AMD64 and Intel EM64T hardware. The company upgraded to the 64-bit software from the 32-bit versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and SQL Server 2000.
Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition delivers greater reliability, resulting in systems that are less prone to failure due to memory leaks and other common problems. The 64-bit version of Windows delivers better performance, resulting in systems that are typically much faster, and that allow developers and IT professionals to meet their performance targets with fewer systems to manage.
The 64-bit version of Windows also offers greater scalability; 64-bit systems provide all the headroom that IT professionals need to grow with their businesses for the life of their hardware. Developers are also interested in the faster time to market of the 64-bit version of Windows; 64-bit systems eliminate the 4-gigabyte memory barrier, so developers spend less time writing memory management code.
Participating in Microsoft Labs
To achieve its support for 64-bit computing with Windows, TPI Software participated in the Microsoft 64-bit testing lab. A test environment, consisting of a TPI SmartPayments Server on both the AMD and Intel hardware platforms, was setup in the lab. The SmartPayments Servers were load balanced and connected to a computer running SQL Server 2000 64-bit Edition on an Intel Itanium2 processor. Three PCs based on Windows XP Professionalx64 Editionand running TPI SmartPayments client applications sent transactions to this cluster.
One of the company’s first tasks was to ensure that the .NET libraries called by SmartPayments Server were still available in the 64-bit versions of Windows. SmartPayments Server has two million lines of code and uses approximately 2,000 Windows application programming interfaces (APIs), so incompatibilities could have been a major problem if the 64-bit versions of Microsoft software had not been designed for compatibility with their 32-bit counterparts. TPI Software only had to rewrite its application to accommodate a new cryptography API—which allocates buffer sizes twice as long as those in the previous version—and migrate some registries to utilize the 64-bit registry folder.
Minimal Migration
“When you consider that we use thousands of .NET libraries and Windows APIs, the fact that we only had to migrate the cryptography API and some registries is pretty amazing,” says Chau. “The migration was very smooth. It only took us two days to migrate the application, run through a complete suite of regression tests, and load test the system to gather performance matrices. With four of our people at the lab for three days, we completed our migration and testing work and verified our support of 64-bit [versions of] Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and SQL Server 2000.”
Benefits
By upgrading its TPI SmartPayments Server application from the 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows and SQL Server to the new 64-bit versions, TPI Software has boosted the performance of its software by 400 percent. Return on investment is up, with a key customer estimating that the 64-bit solution will enable it to boost performance for about 20 percent of the cost of scaling out on a 32-bit platform. And customers gain the high reliability of Windows Server 2003, essential for a mission-critical application.
Performance Up 400 Percent
As a result of the migration to the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server from its 32-bit counterparts, TPI Software is seeing a 400 percent increase in performance, as measured by transactions per second.
Transaction speeds have increased from an original 6 to 12 transactions per second with 32-bit servers, to 32 transactions per second on the 64-bit versions, with only 20 percent CPU utilization. That’s a gain of more than 400 percent attributable to the move to 64-bit Microsoft software.
“Our application is mostly doing string processing and EDI [Electronic Data Interchange] mapping,” says Chau. “It needs the wider data pipe of the 64-bit architecture for faster data flow between the CPU and memory. With that 64-bit pipe and virtually no other change, we can increase performance 400 percent. That’s fantastic.”
Increased Return on Investment
Because TPI Software’s customers will get more performance out of each server license they purchase when they move from the 32-bit version of the software to the 64-bit version, they will increase their return on investment.
For example, Abanco Chief Technology Officer Tracy Metzger estimates that achieving increased performance by moving to 64-bit hardware and software, and retaining the four-server model the company already uses, will cost just $50,000 in new hardware and licenses. That compares to the $250,000 in additional hardware, software, and maintenance personnel needed to support a scaled-out architecture on the 32-bit platform.
“By moving to the 64-bit version of SmartPayments Server on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server, we expect to increase performance by three to four times, for about 20 percent of the cost of scaling out our current infrastructure,” says Metzger. “Our return on investment will shoot up, as will our ability to support our customers as we expand our business.”
Increased Reliability
Chau also lauds the increased reliability of Windows Server 2003 compared to Windows 2000 Server, on which the SmartPayments Server software originally ran.
“Because of the highly mission-critical nature of SmartPayments Server to our customers, 24/7 reliability is crucial,” says Chau. “Windows Server 2003 delivers that reliability, which is why we’re seeing a lot of interest in it from our customers.”
For example, Chau cites the fault tolerance of the Microsoft ASP.NET technology driving the Web-based interaction between the SmartPayments Server and client devices. When a dynamic-link library (DLL) component changes on the application, the Web servers detect the change and automatically load the new DLL while keeping the old DLL in memory. The result is that all connections can continue processing, regardless of which version of the component they need; preexisting connections continue to use the original component while new connections can access the new component. The user receives a smooth experience, rather than being disconnected and having to reconnect to the server.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft's holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
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