Wealth management and pensions administration software provider, Syncsoft has been testing its CapitalX product at HP’s Labs in Sydney to measure the performance and scale of their optimised database design for their new product.
“The test results show a monthly ‘fees and charges’ debit run at the rate of 2.3 million members per hour, running on a single instance of the database. Using an 8 hour window for batch processing, the method used by CapitalX means it can handle more than 18 million member processes per night. This is a breakthrough for our industry. To put this into some context, typically a very large pension fund of, for instance, 500,000 members on a traditional legacy system would run a fees and charges process over a whole weekend and that is only if they had one of the better systems. We are showing performances 10 times faster than that,” says Rory Wainer, managing director, Syncsoft.
The tests were carried out on a basic install of SQL Server 2008, running on Windows Server 2008. Syncsoft ran tests on a master trust product to test a complex product and then ran a less complex industry fund product which scaled to 18.4 million members on an 8 hour overnight run. All CapitalX processes use an optimised database design that includes partitioning of both the data and the workload.
“For our clients this is very important. It gives them so many more options, they can offer more complex feature rich products without paying performance penalties, and it lowers scheduling risks, delivers faster customer service for other processes such as contributions processing, annual statements and the like, and provides business process certainty because there is more time being made available to run these processes. A reduction in costs is immediately obvious because lower cost hardware can be used and staff costs can be contained,” says Wainer.
“The relative speed improvement is phenomenal and will directly translate to other system processes including other batch jobs, online processes and remote users over the internet. Using an 8 CPU system and a storage area network (SAN) our testing ran fairly consistently at 30% CPU utilisation, indicating that better results can be obtained with faster I/O subsystems and tuning the database. It’s a very fast system indeed,” says David Tuke, R&D manager, Syncsoft.