Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Windows Nets 24 Percent Lower TCO over Linux/IBM, With 14 Percent Greater Throughput
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Financial Management
Customer Profile
Atlanta, Georgia–based CheckFree is a leader in financial electronic commerce, including electronic billing and payment, financial services software, and outsourced investment services.
Business Situation
The company sought to develop new financial services industry platforms that would lower TCO and cost per transaction without sacrificing performance, quality, or reliability.
Solution
After a comprehensive study, CheckFree selected the Microsoft® platform (Windows/SQL/.NET) over the IBM-supported Linux solution (Red Hat OS/IBM DB2/WebSphere).
Benefits
24 percent lower TCO
14 percent faster transaction rates
Excellent reliability and availability
Faster time-to-market
Solid security and security management / “The Microsoft solution was 24 percent better than the IBM/Linux solution in terms of total cost of ownership.”
Randy McCoy, Chief Technology Officer, CheckFree Corporation
CheckFree is known for its high-quality electronic commerce infrastructures used by financial institutions. The company seeks to deliver innovation and quality while lowering TCO for customers. In one of its core businesses, CheckFree uses IBM zSeries mainframe computers, but it sought to lower cost per transaction without sacrificing performance or availability. It conducted a study of two solution stacks: one using the Red Hat Linux 9.0 operating system, IBM DB2 Universal Database, and IBM WebSphere; and the other using Microsoft®Windows Server™ 2003, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The result: CheckFree chose the Microsoft solution for one of its next-generation platforms, finding that it delivered 14 percent faster performance and an anticipated 24 percent lower TCO while delivering levels of system reliability that are the hallmark of its business.
Situation
CheckFree Corporation is a leading provider of financial electronic commerce products and services. CheckFree is probably best known for its Electronic Commerce solutions that enable thousands of financial services providers and billers to offer millions of consumers the convenience of receiving and paying their household bills online or in person through retail outlets. The integrated, end-to-end, electronic billing and payment platform is deployed on IBM z-Series mainframes and represents the world’s third-largest IBM DB2 implementation.[1]
As a technology leader that strives to define and deliver the highest standards, CheckFree continually seeks to enhance innovation and operational efficiency for the financial services industry. At the same time, CheckFree seeks to lower TCO for its customer base. While maintaining an ongoing Six Sigma quality and performance improvement program on the z-Series based infrastructure, CheckFree began a TCO project to stringently test the technologies upon which its next-generation platforms might be based. Initially, CheckFree began to look for an Intel-based hardware platform that would result in lower costs for operations, maintenance, and support. The company also wanted to find a software stack that could decrease cost without sacrificing performance—that is, a system that could deliver service levels of 1,000 transactions per second, the amount necessary to handle the traffic produced by 5,500 concurrent users during peak hours. The company was also running approximately 10,000 batch jobs per day with steep peaks in batch traffic on the mainframe during the busiest times of each month. CheckFree wanted to identify a technology solution that would meet its high volume and stringent quality demands with processing power to spare.
Considering the Possibilities
The CheckFree Applied Research and Technology (ART) Center of Excellence is a corporate resource that conducts technology research and testing for the company’s corporate IT function and supports its three divisions. Headed by CheckFree Chief Technology Officer, Randy McCoy, the group is both a center of software development and engineering excellence. The ART group stays abreast of new technologies and vendors, large and small, conducts quality testing on the company’s own software, and evaluates vendors that are being considered for becoming a part of the company’s complex inter-networked infrastructures.
The company’s initial interest for the TCO study was in Linux/Apache/MySQL/Java targeted at information-only (non-transactional) queries. “While we planned to conduct an unbiased exercise, we were admittedly intrigued by the concept of zero software acquisition costs,” says David Odom, Senior Vice President of CheckFree ART. “We initially rejected high-end UNIX stacks such as Sun Solaris/WebLogic/Oracle, and Linux/WebSphere/UDB, as too expensive, and we initially rejected the Microsoft® .NET Framework, assuming it was too immature.”
CheckFree has a data-driven culture and therefore decided to use its ART Center of Excellence to perform an objective and exhaustive comparison of solution stacks before deciding which platforms to consider for future processing environments.
After testing the Linux based configuration and developing some monitoring and management tools, CheckFree saw how much work it would take to knit together the various components and stay current with all of the licenses, upgrades, and updates. “We would have needed a cadre of in-house experts to constantly adjust the open-source system,” says Odom.
CheckFree also discovered that the licensing of MySQL with production-level support was not as low cost as anticipated and that support tools were not up to the level of commercial databases. Benchmark tests revealed that the Linux stack performed poorly when compared to the .NET Framework. “The differences in initial performance results were stark between the open-source and Microsoft numbers. After combining the performance results with what it would take to turn the open-source stack into a comprehensive solution suitable to our purposes, we decided not to pursue an all open-source solution any further,” says Odom.
The company was concerned about the external ramifications of its eventual decision as well. “Our customers are financial institutions; they want us to use stable, well-received, fully supported software,” says Odom. “We determined that the complexity, variety, and lack of end-to-end vendor support of an all open-source solution created more risk than we were willing to take on. And the internal resources required to manage open source could actually offset other TCO gains.”
Narrowing the Field
CheckFree opted to move ahead with a comprehensive vendor supported J2EE platform; Linux, DB2 UDB, WebSphere, and Java. CheckFree also decided to reconsider the .NET Framework because a parallel shadow effort on the Microsoft.NET Framework-based stack with Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 had produced eye-catching results. “The Microsoft solution performed so much better than the open source stack that it was hard to ignore,” says Odom. “Given this new data, we felt we would be negligent if we proceeded with the TCO study without considering Microsoft.”
CheckFree was further convinced to include Microsoft in the next phase of its TCO study after speaking with credible references from similar enterprise organizations that were successfully developing and running critical applications with the Microsoft .NET Framework and SQL Server.
Establishing Criteria
With its two finalists selected for the TCO study, CheckFree instituted some guiding principles to aid in the clear evaluation of the two solutions. The company elected to weight its constraints in favor of quality, low risk, and proven suppliers, while still looking for competitive performance and overall cost.
In order to reduce integration risks, simplify support, and improve vendor leverage, CheckFree wanted a solution that, wherever possible, included interoperable products supported by a single vendor. “When we have a problem, I want to be able to make one call and not have to endure a multi-vendor finger pointing exercise,” says Odom.
Examining the risk of vendor lock-in, CheckFree took into account application portability on each stack. The company concluded that vendor lock-in protection was more practically insured by competition than by portability, both in terms of price and stability.
In addition to its decision to use Intel-based hardware, CheckFree sought a solution that used a service-oriented architecture, which is a growing requirement across the financial services industry. CheckFree also wanted to take advantage of web services, the standard manifestation of application interfaces for a service-oriented architecture. The company considered web services support and performance to be fundamental selection criteria for its new solution stack.
Evaluating the Microsoft Solution Stack
To get a thorough assessment of its two finalists, CheckFree spent time at the Microsoft SQL Server Customer Lab in Redmond, Washington and at IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab. What began as a 60-day trial of the two platforms in June 2003 continued through the rest of the year.
Microsoft Services dedicated the equivalent of one full-time consultant to make sure that CheckFree received consistent day-to-day support. Together with various subject matter experts from within Microsoft, Microsoft Services helped CheckFree tune the performance of the benchmark application.
After initial testing at CheckFree, members of the CheckFree evaluation team traveled to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. Microsoft Services consultants worked with the Microsoft SQL Server team to benchmark the company’s proof-of-concept metrics in the SQL Server Customer Lab.
While in Redmond, CheckFree interviewed individual development teams responsible for key functions in SQL Server, and Microsoft hosted sessions regarding strategy, support, scalability, and vision. The Microsoft SQL Server team of experts also held a question-and-answer session to address configuration and architecture issues at CheckFree.
At the SQL Server Customer Lab, the Microsoft solution stack reached numbers that were greater than 3,500 requests per second. “We definitely saw performance potential in the SQL Server scalability lab that we didn’t see with the SQL Server 2000 tests that we ran in our internal lab,” says Marc Castel, Consulting Software Engineer for CheckFree Applied Research and TechnologyCenter for Excellence. “It was great to see the high-performance system the Microsoft team put together. While we could not use the Microsoft performance lab results in our head to head comparison, we saw the performance potential for future production environments.”
Evaluating the IBM/Linux Solution Stack
Just as Microsoft helped CheckFree test the Microsoft solution stack, IBM also worked with CheckFree to assess the performance of the IBM/Linux stack. CheckFree wrote XML web services applications in both Java and C# for the different platforms. The company gave IBM all of its .NET Framework–based code and SQL Server 2000 schema so that IBM could use it to match the performance of the Microsoft solution. “We were completely open, sharing our code so that the IBM developers could translate it to Java and compete to the best of their ability,” says Castel. “We also gave them the Java code we’d already written for our initial tests of the open source stack.”
IBM spent five weeks optimizing its solution stack at the CheckFree lab. The effort demonstrated that getting an IBM/Linux solution up and running required a great deal more time and effort than implementing one from Microsoft. “Despite a productive effort from an excellent IBM staff, we got the impression that it took a complex combination of skills to stabilize and maintain the IBM/Linux system,” says Odom. “During the testing, there were three experts working on the IBM/Linux stack—one for Linux, one for DB2, and one for WebSphere Application Server. The Microsoft solution was handled by two half-time people who were able to address all aspects of the stack, such as coding techniques, management techniques, and the operating system. We figured that this alone was an indication of lower TCO in terms of resources required for integration and maintenance.”
Solution
After considering all elements of its testing, the CheckFree ART Center of Excellence decided on the Microsoft-based solution made up of the Windows Server 2003 operating system, SQL Server 2000, and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Implementing the Microsoft Platform at CheckFree Investment Services (CIS)
The first opportunity to use the new platform was within the CheckFree Investment Services (CIS) division. The CIS division is currently developing CheckFree EPL the company’s next-generation system for the Separately Managed Accounts (SMA) and the investment management industry.
CheckFree Investment Services (CIS) is the leader in the SMA industry, which is expected to be one of the most rapidly growing spaces in the financial industry in the next decade. Today, nearly 1.8 million portfolios, totaling more than U.S.$1 trillion in assets at hundreds of companies, are managed with the CheckFree SMA system.
The goal of CheckFree EPL is to lower CIS clients’ overall operating costs by 50 percent for the company’s SMA customers. “We have an aggressive business goal for CheckFree EPL, and we look to technology to help us reach it,” says Cheryl Nash, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Business Development for CheckFree Investment Services. In order to gain competitive agility, CIS needed to determine the technology upon which this growing segment of the market would be based and establish an aggressive timetable for its delivery.
CheckFree Investment Services was leaning strongly toward implementing a Java-based solution for CheckFree EPL. Upon reviewing the findings of the ART Center of Excellence, however, the decision was made to switch to a solution based on SQL Server 2000 and the .NET Framework and to work with a Microsoft development partner to bring the solution to market to meet the demands of the rapidly growing SMA marketplace. “We were platform neutral,” says Nash. “We wanted to use whatever solution was the best for meeting our business goals. For us, Microsoft simply was the best solution.”
The Microsoft platform will help lower TCO for CheckFree and its customers because the interoperability inherent in the solution will result in a lower cost of integrations. “Our customers have a variety of platforms, and we need a solution that can interoperate with all platforms, as well as speed development to get to market more quickly,” says Nash. “The Microsoft platform will be the IT strategic asset to help us meet our business goal of lowering our customers’ TCO by 50 percent.”
Benefits
The CheckFreeARTCenter for Excellence TCO study results demonstrated to the company that a Microsoft solution stack would provide the cost savings, performance, and reliability that it wanted to reach its long-term business goals.
24 Percent Lower TCO
The evaluation revealed that for the company’s anticipated needs, the Microsoft solution cost less per server than the IBM/Linux solution. “Lower per-server costs combined with higher performance per server amplified the overall advantage of the Microsoft stack, based on CheckFree requirements for its different processing environments,” says McCoy. “After conducting a comprehensive six-month evaluation, we found that the Microsoft solution was 24 percent better than the IBM/Linux solution in terms of total cost of ownership.”
Superior Performance with 14 Percent Faster Transaction Rates
Throughput levels achieved in the performance testing of the Microsoft stack were consistently and significantly greater than those generated using the IBM/Linux stack.
“The TCO study tests ultimately resulted in a difference of 14 percent better performance in terms of transaction rates in favor of the SQL Server-based Microsoft solution over J2EE with DB2 and WebSphere,” says Odom. CheckFree conducted the comparison using the same layers of hardware for both potential solution stacks.
For a company that serves the financial services industry, reliability, security and swift recovery in the event of a disaster also are crucial. In simple failure recovery tests on the same configurations used for performance testing, the Microsoft solution recovered far better than the J2EE stack. “While we expect that the recovery performance of the J2EE stack could be significantly improved, the tests we ran again indicated that the J2EE stack was more difficult to configure and more sensitive to change,” says Odom.
Excellent System Reliability and Availability
Although it goes without saying that any solution needs to be reliable, CheckFree has found the Microsoft solution to be dependable and available to meet its large-scale transaction processing. “With so much data to handle, we needed a reliable, resilient solution that will help us meet our own business goals and the goals of our customers,” says Odom. “The SQL Server-based Microsoft solution will do just that. Having that level of mission-critical reliability is a given for our business—without it, the project never would have gotten off the ground.”
CheckFree is looking forward to a system that will require low maintenance because the system itself is less complex than its previous environment. The solution will require less maintenance time from the IT department for troubleshooting, fixing drivers, applying patches, updating software, and resolving compatibility issues. Additionally, the Microsoft solution provides the resilience to maintain service in the face of internal or external disruptions. If a disruption is too great and affects the environment, the Microsoft solution is designed to be quickly and easily restored.