A new TANGO Benchmark on HPE NonStop

In 2012, Lusis Payments conducted a historic proof of concept with partner HPE at the HP ATC (advanced technical center) in Palo Alto, CA. TANGO was tested for 48 hours straight at full capacity. The system processed 2,500 TPS without fail. The hardware configuration used at the time of the benchmark was chosen to match a client’s production system and consisted of a 8-processor HPE J-series NonStop. TANGO proved responsive and surpassed normal daily tasks and nightly settlements. This proof of concept proved that TANGO was fault tolerant and achieved maximum volumes and throughput of a total daily volume of 50 million transactions per day.

The outstanding results came from long hard-working sessions with the HPE teams which we were proud to work with. The first week included our CTO working on-site. Soon after, he was joined by our senior project leaders, and they received significant additional support from our lab in Paris. In addition to the dedicated HPE team, the client’s team also partnered with us to test the conformity of the benchmark protocol. HPE worked with the client to reproduce its environment for a true simulation. It was great project, and we were proud of the outcome.

Since then, HPE has continued to suggest that we test TANGO on the newest (Intel based chip) hardware. As we were still quite pleased with the 2500TPS results and the fact that the client continued to realize improved performance on their HPE NonStop platform, we chose not to do additional test campaigns in subsequent years.

Until now. 

At the end of Q1 we said “ok, let’s do it”! At that time, bandwidth was quite low, so we made it “our dry way of doing it.” We used our Vanilla switch based on the TANGO version 7 platform installed on HPE NS server: 8 processor, 6 core NS7-X3 system again at the HP ATC labs. This system runs OS release L21.06.17.2 with NonStop SQL/MX 3.7.2. Each NonStop processor contained 256 GB of memory. We used a very similar testing protocol without any specific tunning. And “Torpedo… LOS”!

On our first run we achieved 3,500 TPS. Then with less than 10 hours of tuning, we easily reached 4,500 TPS sustained for two straight hours. 

So, this has become our new reference on HPE NonStop:
4,500 transactions per second on an 8-CPU machine.

And this was simply done with our Vanilla switch and some very light tuning. So, nothing heroic, just the standard product using a standard configuration.

In Q3, we will test TANGO with the new Posix Kernel of HPE NonStop and see where we take it!

​Stay tuned. 
Philippe Préval Lusis
CEO Chez Lusis