Omicronn benchmarks Trax on Intel Itanium 2 processor-based platforms

Trax supports financial organizations processing large volumes of financial messages in business-critical and distributed environments, aiming at ultra high STP-rates to reduce operational costs. Trax on Intel Itanium architecture showed the fastest STP performance Omicronn measured up to now, achieving a performance increase of over 300% after software optimisation.

An extensive benchmark infrastructure was set up to systematically test the performance of Trax. This infrastructure consisted of a core Intel Itanium 2 processor-based server with four Intel Itanium 2 processors at 1.4 Ghz. The test environment also included an Intel processor-based system running BEA Weblogic Server 8.1 and Oracle 9i Database.

Measurements showed that Trax on Intel Itanium performed extremely well, processing up to 5 million messages an hour. This processing includes reading the messages from file, converting them to objects, validating message format and validating the content.

"All financial institutions, including banks, stock markets and clearing & settlement organizations execute under increasing pressure to control operational cost for the brokerage of their financial message streams," says Hans Cobben, Managing Partner of Omicronn. "Transfer speed and STP-levels of these millions of messages processed daily, determine whether tight business margins can be met. With Trax running on Intel Itanium 2 processors, Omicronn has a next generation platform to tackle the challenges of its customers. BEA WebLogic on the Itanium 2 processor gives us a bank-proof foundation with superb reliability and uptime. Banks and other large institutions no longer have to rely on expensive RISC or mainframe platforms. With Trax, they can move into a much more scalable and cost-effective environment."

"Intel has a strong record of working with companies to deliver complete solutions for the finance industry, where the ability to process huge amounts of complex data quickly and reliably is core to day-to-day operations," said Tom Garrison, Director of Enterprise Marketing, Intel EMEA. "We are delighted to continue this work with Omicronn, and also that the software optimisation on Intel Itanium 2-based servers now delivers the industry with a high-performance solution for running data-intensive mission-critical financial tasks."

Tackling Financial Business Issues

Trax is a financial message broker, aimed at solving STP challenges for the financial industry. Banks, clearing organizations and stock markets need increasingly higher transfer and STP rates. Changing European legislation with regards to cross border payment tariffs, increased reporting requirements in support of anti money laundering laws, automation and netting of payment flows and of course T+1 settlement all heavily influence the processes that feed and read financial messages.

Trax is an advanced rule-based software architecture, encompassing highly configurable software components allowing to validate, route, convert, enrich virtually any type of financial message. This includes payments, deal confirmations, pre-advice messages and reconciliation information.