Harland Financial Solutions announced today that the Phoenix System, the company's Microsoft Windows-based enterprise core processing solution, successfully processed account volumes equivalent to a $25 billion-asset model financial institution in benchmark testing.
The account and transaction processing benchmark employed Microsoft's Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and was configured using a variety of low-cost "off-the-shelf" hardware, demonstrating the Phoenix System's ability to deliver secure, high-performance core processing for a lower total cost of ownership than alternative solutions.
The benchmark included a range of account processing tests (for model banks with a mix of 500,000, 800,000 and more than one million active deposit and loan accounts), as well as extensive testing for online transaction performance.
"We designed this benchmark to simulate real-world account mixes, allowing us to test specific areas of performance in the solution," said Aaron Jones, vice president of product development at Harland Financial Solutions. "In future benchmarks, we'll expand the profile to increasingly larger model banks."
"In this economic environment, financial services companies need to achieve greater productivity from their IT systems," said Colleen Healy, general manager, U.S. Financial Services Group at Microsoft. "The Phoenix System's benchmark results illustrate the value of building solutions on the Microsoft platform in order to optimize security and processing power of financial services solutions at lower costs."
The Phoenix System processed multichannel online transactions at a rate of more than 500,000 per hour using a mix of teller, ATM/POS, online banking, account origination, and telephone banking transactions. The benchmark confirmed that as transaction performance demand increases in a financial institution, the Phoenix System's web services-based transaction gateway can scale in linear progression-simply by adding additional "off-the-shelf" application servers.
"This benchmark is a validation of our efforts to fully leverage Microsoft technologies for better performance and integration-across the financial services enterprise," said Tom Berdan, vice president of product management at Harland Financial Solutions. "It also means bankers can have confidence in the Phoenix System's ability to support their aspirations for growth, while truly reducing their total cost of ownership."
Harland Financial Solutions' test results also show that performance does not have to be sacrificed for security. The Phoenix System benchmark was achieved even with the entire database encrypted using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Transparent Data Encryption, which enables data to be stored securely by encrypting the database files. If the disks that contain database files become compromised, data in those files is protected because that data can only be de-encrypted by an authorized agent. SQL Server performs the encryption and de-encryption directly, so the process is entirely transparent to connecting applications. Backup copies of encrypted database files are also automatically encrypted.