Put to the Stress Test
VisaNet gets pushed to the limits each year in a simulated test that has helped ensure 100% availability for the last 21 peak seasons.
Posted by: Manny Trillo, SVP Network Processing, Visa Inc.
Every summer, the holidays come early for Visa network engineers. For the past 22 years, they’ve run an annual stress test to prepare VisaNet—the world’s largest retail payments network—for the heavy onslaught of transactions that come our way during the holiday shopping season.
Think five days straight of around-the-clock testing of our systems. It all happens at a facility in Maryland, where Visa and IBM engineers work together to create a mirror image of Visa’s authorization systems and bombard the network with thousands of simulated transactions. The goal? To determine the best hardware and software configuration to handle the increase in transaction volume expected this holiday season. The test also uncovers how many transactions in a single second VisaNet can process, how new payment applications will impact the systems, and any possible bottlenecks that may need future remediation.
This year’s test, which concluded on August 27th, produced record results: It showed that VisaNet can handle more than 56,000 transaction messages per second—that’s greater than four times the actual peak transaction rate of last year. This puts Visa in an excellent position to support card issuers and merchants this coming holiday season, giving them confidence and peace of mind that every purchase will be made swiftly and securely.
The Stress Test plays a critical role in future-proofing VisaNet and helps Visa stay ahead of increases in transaction volumes—whether coming from newly banked consumers in developing markets or from consumers in developed countries shopping with mobile devices, tablets and PCs.
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