Dimensioning a data processing system after a merger of two banks

Mergers of companies entail many changes and apart from the fact that there may be more than enough employees it is necessary to resize the systems and eliminate everything unnecessary.

Customer: one bank, before two

Need: Check whether the data processing system of one of the banks would have sufficient capacity to serve the customers of both.

Previous situation: one of the banks had just invested a lot of money in a modern computer system and wanted to see if it had to be expanded to accommodate the business of the two.

Determinants of the project: There was a great hurry to reach a conclusion.

System description: a Sun unix cluster, working with the Tuxedo transaction manager on an Oracle DB. In addition, MQseries was used for communication with the Mainframe of the parent bank.

Implementation: two evaluation methods were carried out in parallel. One of them consisted of evaluating with the help of a program how much the load of the different components of the system would increase when all the clients that were estimated (four times more) were present. The other method of evaluation was to make a real simulation of the new load. To do this, a database was created with four times more data on clients and related tables. The transactions estimated to occur after the banks were merged were injected into it and the response times were measured. The first method, that of estimation, determined that the system needed to be augmented. The second method that it had to be increased even more but it was found that the load was produced by a couple of requests to the system and after optimizing the Oracle queries that they included, the result was that there was less load on the system than in the initial situation with four times fewer customers. This led to the conclusion that no expansion was needed, but as the budget was approved, the computing system was still expanded, just in case, but not to the extent originally planned.

Cost of the project: 15 days x 3 technicians+consultancy of two companies