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Electronic payment company NYCE Corp., citing increasing membership and demand for real-time information, is migrating its InfoManager workstation application from Hewlett-Packard Co.s ProLiant servers to Stratus Technologies Inc.s ftServer platform.
The browser-based application is used by NYCEs network of 2,200 financial institutions, retailers and ATM operators to get immediate access to data such as transaction histories, credit updates, file transfers and account status, said Brian Mecca, director of data center operations at Montvale, N.J.-based NYCE. And demand for that information on a real-time basis is increasing, Mecca said.
“Something that used to take a half-hour they now can download in three to five minutes,” he said.
The network processes about 100 million transactions per month, according to NYCE.
Over the past three months, NYCE has brought in five Stratus fault-tolerant servers—two of the entry-level ft3200 systems and three mid-range ft5240 servers. The company currently is testing the servers and expects to get the InfoManager system up and running on them later in the quarter, Mecca said.
Both servers are one- and two-way Intel-based systems, with the ft3200 powered by 800MHz Pentium III processors and the ft5240 running 2.4GHz Xeon chips.
The servers are part of the ftServer family of systems—including the four-way ft6500 server—for Microsoft Windows Advanced Server environments that Stratus touts as having 99.999 percent uptime. The key is that each server houses two identical systems that run in lock-step, so that if one component in the system fails, others will continue to perform the job without an interruption.
“The best way to think about it is that there are two computers in one box executing the same transaction,” said Philip Izzo, director of business development, financial servers, for Stratus, in Maynard, Mass.
Prices for all three servers range from $20,000 to $100,000, according to Izzo.
- Read more articles by Jeffrey Burt