T24 Hardware Sizing

Specifications
For
BH
April, 2019

Information in this document is subject to change without notice.

No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, for any purpose,
without the express written permission of TEMENOS HEADQUARTERS SA.

COPYRIGHT 2017-2020 TEMENOS HEADQUARTERS SA. All rights reserved.

T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Table of Contents
Executive Summary..................................................................................................................................... 3
Operational Requirements....................................................................................................................... 3
Hardware Sizing....................................................................................................................................... 4
Current Volumes................................................................................................................................... 4
Third Year Projected Volumes.............................................................................................................. 4
Hardware requirements............................................................................................................................... 5
Base T24 Software requirements................................................................................................................ 5
Hardware Sizing.......................................................................................................................................... 6
Core Processing Volumes........................................................................................................................ 7
Current Volumes................................................................................................................................... 7
Third Year Projected Volumes.............................................................................................................. 7
Close of Business Processing.................................................................................................................. 8
COB Requirement................................................................................................................................ 8
Presentation Tier...................................................................................................................................... 9
Internal Users – T24 Browser............................................................................................................... 9
External Users – Temenos Connect Internet Banking..........................................................................9
Application Tier...................................................................................................................................... 10
Current Volumes................................................................................................................................. 10
Third Year Projected Volumes............................................................................................................ 10
Data Tier................................................................................................................................................ 11
Current Volumes................................................................................................................................. 11
Third Year Projected Volumes............................................................................................................ 11
Storage Requirements........................................................................................................................... 12
Network Bandwidth Requirements......................................................................................................... 13
Presentation tier transaction mix............................................................................................................ 14
Application tier transaction mix............................................................................................................... 15
Data tier transaction mix........................................................................................................................ 16
Understanding the Sizing Process......................................................................................................... 17
Calculation of CPU Requirements.......................................................................................................... 17
Calculation of Disk Requirements.......................................................................................................... 17
Calculation of Memory Requirements.................................................................................................... 17
Calculation of Bandwidth Requirements................................................................................................18
Close of Business Calculation................................................................................................................ 18
Technically Approved solutions for T24 R18.......................................................................................... 19
Hardware options................................................................................................................................... 20

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Appendix................................................................................................................................................ 20

Executive Summary
This document provides a hardware sizing specification to supply adequate capacity to meet the bank’s
current processing requirements and sufficient scalability to meet future requirements based upon three
years of projected growth.

The sizing has been calculated based upon the operational requirements provided by the bank, for both
current volumes and third year projected volumes, against metrics Temenos have gathered through
extensive performance testing undertaken with hardware partners.

The sizing recommendations are based on the Temenos Model Bank environment (with minimal
customizations). The hardware solutions for the bank have to be arrived at by understanding their local
developments, customizations, actual transaction volumes, concurrent users etc. over and above the
recommendations of the sizing team.

Operational Requirements
The guideline sizing has been produced to meet the following operational requirements

3rd Year Estimated

Year Current Volume
Volume
# of Customers 800000 1200000

# of Accounts 1000000 1521000

Concurrent external users 4000 10000

Bank users 2000 3380

Throughput Requirement (TPS)

Online 28 41

COB 556 845

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Hardware Sizing
T24 is an open solution giving our clients the choice of hardware vendor and platform. Consequently
Temenos does not prescribe vendor specific models of hardware when sizing for T24. The hardware
sizing for processing is based upon the amount of CPU cores for a given CPU architecture. Temenos
defines ‘Cores’ as complete processing units, not vertical threading solutions.
Temenos benchmarks T24 against a base CPU architecture (Intel Itanium), and uses the figures obtained
to extrapolate the required CPU performance using a multiplier against the bank’s target CPU
architecture.
In some cases, the processing capacity of a given tier can be satisfied with a single machine. However,
Temenos would suggest that the bank implements a clustered solution ultimately providing no single point
of failure.
In a fully resilient topology, multiple servers coexist at each of the following tiers: Presentation, Application
and Data. This delivers a future-proof solution where additional processing capacity can be made
available simply by adding hardware to each tier when required.
Due to the openness of T24, Temenos recommends that the bank consider the cost benefits associated
with deploying a distributed solution based upon commodity hardware.

Current Volumes

Tier Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Gigabytes) (Mbits per sec)

Presentatio IBM POWER 3*P8 4.35 GHz

n (T24 6 31
Browser)

Presentatio IBM POWER 12*P8 4.35 GHz

24
n (TCIB) 31

Application IBM POWER 12*P8 4.35 GHz 36 562

Data IBM POWER 6*P8 4.35 GHz 24 606

Third Year Projected Volumes

Tier Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Gigabytes) (Mbits per sec)

Presentatio IBM POWER 4*P8 4.35 GHz

n (T24 8 44
Browser)

Presentatio IBM POWER 30*P8 4.35 GHz

n (TCIB) 60 44

Application IBM POWER 16*P8 4.35 GHz 48 853

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Data IBM POWER 8*P8 4.35 GHz 32 921

Hardware requirements
The guideline sizing has been based upon the IBM POWER chipset at all tiers utilizing an Oracle
database running at an estimated 80% capacity.

The web tier hardware servers could be in one location or alternatively distributed for practicality. Any
optional middleware servers for MQ or WebLogic or similar have not been specified as part of this sizing
recommendation.

Base T24 Software requirements

With exception to operating systems, the software requirements listed below are considered mandatory to
run the T24 solution in its simplest configuration.

Name Description Scope

T24 The T24 binaries and libraries Application
supporting the business
functions.
T24 Browser The T24 user interface. A java Web
servlet web application
Java The Java runtime environment Web / Data / Application
T24 Open Connectivity Integration framework providing Web
Framework (TOCF) support for multiple types of
middleware, batch file
operations and web services.
JEE Application Server Java web application server for Web
hosting the T24 Browser and
T24 Open Connectivity
Framework (TOCF)
components
Oracle Database Data

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Hardware Sizing

The T24 architecture consists of three logical tiers (Presentation, Application and Data). For a fully robust
and resilient solution Temenos recommends architecture that benefit from T24’s ability to scale at each
and every tier. In such a topology, there would be at least two servers or logical partitions within a single
resilient server for each of the tiers.
The hardware sizing provided is based upon the total overall processing requirements for each logical
tier. The bank may choose to implement a solution that distributes this across a more sophisticated
deployment model, in line with wider enterprise architecture.
Temenos benchmarks T24 against a base CPU architecture (Intel Itanium), and uses the figures obtained
to extrapolate the required CPU performance using a multiplier against the bank’s target CPU
architecture.
Storage requirements and identification of core processing volumes for parallel transaction execution is
also based upon the number of customers, accounts, online users and ultimate transaction throughput
requirements.

In this sizing exercise the CPU requirements for each tier for the current volumes are:
Présentation Tier – T24 Browser: 3 Cores
Presentation Tier – TCIB: 12 Cores
Application Tier: 12 Cores
Data Tier: 6 Cores
The diagram below illustrates an example physical deployment.

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Core Processing Volumes

The sizing has been produced to satisfy both online and ‘Close of Business’ transaction throughput and
has been based upon the following volumes.

Current Volumes

Bank Account Type

Customers 800000

Accounts 1000000

Concurrent Users (External) 4000

Bank Users (Internal) 2000

Online 28

Third Year Projected Volumes

Bank Account Type

Customers 1200000

Accounts 1521000

Concurrent Users (External) 10000

Bank Users (Internal) 3380

Online 41

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Close of Business Processing

Temenos has chosen the AA Capitalization job as the most expensive Close of Business (COB) process
taking 75% of the overall time. Temenos has calculated an overall ‘Transactions per Second’ (TPS)
requirement for the COB based upon the AA Capitalization process, thus providing an estimated overall
COB time of 3 hours.
The hardware has been specified to process the core COB jobs within 3 hours. In our experience, client
specific reporting requirements and interfaces can increase the COB execution time further.

COB Requirement
Current Volume Third Yr Estimated
Year
Volume

COB COB
COB Process

556 845
Transactions Per Second

44.24 67.24
Application CPU cycles

36 48
Application Memory (in GB)

562 853
Application Network (Mbps)

21.82 33.16
Database CPU cycles

24 32
Database Memory (in GB)

606 921
Database Network (Mbps)

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Presentation Tier
The presentation tier provides the user interface for direct users, such as employees, and the application
framework to support that functionality. The T24 user interface is a java web application that must be
hosted within a JEE Web Application Server. This web application serves the user interface to the client
through a browser.
Temenos recommends that this tier be physically formed of more than one web application server.
Multiple presentation servers are used to provide resilience (session state persistence), channel isolation,
scalability and availability.
The T24 Open Connectivity Framework (TOCF), a collection of JEE integration technologies provided
with T24 may also reside in the same application server cluster.
The indicative hardware requirements to support this tier are as follows.

Internal Users – T24 Browser

Current Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 3*P8 4.35 GHz 6 GB 31

Fifth Year Projected Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 4*P8 4.35 GHz 8 GB 44

External Users – Temenos Connect Internet Banking

Current Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 12*P8 4.35 GHz 24 GB 31

Fifth Year Projected Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 30*P8 4.35 GHz 60 GB 44

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Application Tier
The application tier hosts the software components that provide the business functionality and the
application framework to support that functionality.
In order to implement a fully resilient solution, Temenos recommends that the application tier be
physically formed of multiple application servers. Each application server operates independently and is
installed with the same application software. Any application server can provide the services to support:
 Online transaction processing such as through the User Interface
 Participate in background services such as the Close of Business

Multiple application servers are used to provide resilience, channel isolation, scalability, performance and
availability.
The indicative hardware requirements to support this tier are as follows.

Current Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 12*P8 4.35 GHz 36 GB 124

Third Year Projected Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 16*P8 4.35 GHz 48 GB 170

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Data Tier

The Data tier is a major infrastructure component for maintaining the availability and resilience of the
entire T24 implementation. As such, a fully resilient T24 implementation requires a fully resilient and fully
available data tier.

It is physically formed of a server cluster hosting the relational database management system (RDBMS)
and a non-blocking storage solution.

The indicative hardware requirements to support this tier are as follows

Current Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 6*P8 4.35 GHz 24 GB 118

Third Year Projected Volumes

Chipset CPU (Cores) Memory Network Bandwidth

(Mbits per sec)

IBM POWER 8*P8 4.35 GHz 32 GB 161

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Storage Requirements
The storage solution required to support the banks volumes must be capable of sustaining a Storage
Performance Council (SPC-1) IO benchmark of 29600 IOPS. The storage solution must meet these
figures with a configuration capable of conforming to the bank’s data redundancy policies.

The disk requirements below have been calculated based on the current and projected daily transaction
volume (growth).

It is Temenos policy not to specifically recommend hardware from any given supplier. Therefore the
decision to purchase a particular type of storage array must lie with the customer. Temenos recommends
a “non-blocking” multi disk, striped array capable of supporting the I/O required by the bank.

IOPS (i/o per second)  29600

Recommended Stripe Size  1 MB

RAID  0+1

Oracle Block Size  8k

Disk space estimation Current  530 Gigabytes (growth)

Disk space estimation Third year projection  820 Gigabytes

Disk Requirement for Three years

# of Years Size in GB

1 530

2 660

3 820

Note: Disk array allocation is entirely based on storage system performance.

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Network Bandwidth Requirements

The network bandwidth calculations mentioned in this document show transaction rate I/O’s across the
network.
These rates are in Megabits. When added together it can be seen that the requirement between each tier
needs to be in excess of 921 megabits per second (peak for 3rd year volumes). Temenos recommends a
minimum of two dedicated 1/10 gigabit network cards between tiers to cover the bandwidth and resilience
should a card fail.
It is advised that high speed fibre connections be used where possible between tiers and multiple 1/10
gigabit cards be used for resilience.

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Presentation tier transaction mix

Below is a breakdown of the current mix or transactions which have been applied to the presentation tier.
The overall requirement has been reported in the presentation tier summary on page 9. This describes
the transaction type with the required transactions per second and the CPU cycles required.

Network bandwidth required is the sum of the bandwidth requirement for the request sent from the client
to the presentation tier and response from presentation tier to the client plus the request from the
presentation tier to the application tier and the response sent from the application tier to the presentation
tier.

Current Volume 3rd Yr Projection

Channel Transaction Type Mix%
TPS CPU N/W TPS CPU N/W

Branch Office Account Creation 5% 1 0.23 0.47 2 0.46 0.93

ATMPOS Balance Inquiry 10% 3 0 0.71 4 0 0.95

ATMPOS Cash Withdrawal 15% 4 0 1.72 6 0 2.59

Internet Bank Enquiry 10% 3 0.52 0.71 4 0.7 0.95

Internet Bank Account Statement 5% 1 0.17 0.24 2 0.35 0.48

Branch Office Clearing 30% 9 2.35 4.53 13 3.4 6.54

Branch Office Teller-Deposits 5% 1 0.24 0.47 2 0.48 0.94

Branch Office AA-Loans 10% 3 3.65 12.2 4 4.86 16.26

Branch Office AA-Deposits 10% 3 3.06 10.43 4 4.08 13.9

TPS – Transaction Per Second

CPU – CPU Cycles (in billions)
N/W – Network Bandwidth (in Mbps)

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Application tier transaction mix

Below is a breakdown of the current volume mix for transactions which have been applied to the
application tier. The overall requirement has been reported in the application tier summary on page 10.
This describes the transaction type with the required transactions per second and the CPU cycles
required.

Network bandwidth required is the sum of the bandwidth requirement for the request sent from the
presentation tier to the application tier and the response sent from the application tier to the presentation
tier plus the request (query) sent from the application tier to the database tier and the response from the
database tier to the application tier.

Current Volume 3rd Yr Projection

Channel Transaction Type Mix%
TPS CPU N/W TPS CPU N/W

Branch Office Account Creation 5% 1 0.31 1.4 2 0.61 2.8

ATMPOS Balance Inquiry 10% 3 0.59 4.13 4 0.78 5.5

ATMPOS Cash Withdrawal 15% 4 1.53 3.86 6 2.29 5.78

Internet Bank Enquiry 10% 3 0.59 4.13 4 0.78 5.5

Internet Bank Account Statement 5% 1 0.2 1.38 2 0.39 2.75

Branch Office Clearing 30% 9 4.41 13.09 13 6.38 18.9

Branch Office Teller-Deposits 5% 1 0.46 1.38 2 0.92 2.77

Branch Office AA-Loans 10% 3 14.59 48.69 4 19.45 64.92

Branch Office AA-Deposits 10% 3 13.75 45.93 4 18.34 61.24

TPS – Transaction Per Second

CPU – CPU Cycles (in billions)
N/W – Network Bandwidth (in Mbps)

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Data tier transaction mix

Below is a breakdown of the current volume mix for transactions which have been applied to the data tier.
The overall requirement has been reported in the data tier summary on page 11. This describes the
transaction type with the required transactions per second and the CPU cycles required.

Network bandwidth required is the sum of the bandwidth requirement for the request sent from the
application tier to the database tier and the response sent from database tier to the application tier.

Current Volume 3rd Yr Projection

Channel Transaction Type Mix%
TPS CPU N/W TPS CPU N/W

Branch Office Account Creation 5% 1 0.15 1.19 2 0.31 2.37

ATMPOS Balance Inquiry 10% 3 0.36 4.09 4 0.48 5.46

ATMPOS Cash Withdrawal 15% 4 0.48 3.12 6 0.72 4.67

Internet Bank Enquiry 10% 3 0.36 4.09 4 0.48 5.46

Internet Bank Account Statement 5% 1 0.12 1.36 2 0.24 2.73

Branch Office Clearing 30% 9 1.77 11.84 13 2.55 17.11

Branch Office Teller-Deposits 5% 1 0.16 1.11 2 0.33 2.22

Branch Office AA-Loans 10% 3 2.5 46.29 4 3.34 61.72

Branch Office AA-Deposits 10% 3 2.47 44.5 4 3.29 59.33

TPS – Transaction Per Second

CPU – CPU Cycles (in billions)
N/W – Network Bandwidth (in Mbps)

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Understanding the Sizing Process

Temenos have identified the performance requirements for many typical transactions and have
assembled a product performance catalogue detailing metrics for CPU, RAM and Storage requirements.
These metrics form the baseline units by which the performance requirements may be extrapolated.

Calculation of CPU Requirements

Temenos benchmarks T24 against a base CPU architecture (Intel Itanium), and uses the figures obtained
to extrapolate the required CPU performance using a conversion factor against the bank’s target CPU
architecture.
In order to calculate the CPU requirements the following formula is applied.
CPU Cycles required for target hardware =
CPU cycles required per transaction * transactions per second * conversion factor for target
hardware against Intel Itanium
Temenos is then able to achieve the required number of CPU cycles per second. This value can be
normalized with the available processors in the market. For example:
Number of cores of Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz is calculated for below
10 Billion Cycles / 2.66 GHz = ~4 Processor Cores
A minimum of 2 cores per tier is recommended if the calculated cores are less than 2

Calculation of Disk Requirements

The formula for the disk space is calculated using the formula
No of transactions updating database x average record size x No of working days in a year

For example:

No of transactions updating database = 10,000

Average record size = 8k
Number of days in a year = 30 x 12
Disk size in GB for 1st year= (10000 * 8) * (30*12) / (1024 * 1024)
For subsequent years, the percentage of growth is applied

Calculation of Memory Requirements

Memory requirement is based on the number of cores recommended. Memory for web tier in GB = 2 *
number of cores of web tier e.g., if number of cores required for web is 3, then memory required is 3*2 = 6
GB. For application and database, it is 3* no of cores and 4 * no of cores respectively.

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Calculation of Bandwidth Requirements

Temenos calculates the bandwidth required between each tier and uses jMeter to simulate the client
connection to the presentation tier
The bandwidth requirement for each tier is the sum total of bandwidth consumed by the request and
response of a transaction through each of the tiers.
For the presentation layer, the network bandwidth required is the sum of the bandwidth requirement for
the request sent from the client to the presentation tier and response from presentation tier to the client
plus the request from the presentation tier to the application tier and the response sent from the
application tier to the presentation tier.
For the application layer, the network bandwidth required is the sum of the bandwidth requirement for the
request sent from the presentation tier to the application tier and the response sent from the application
tier to the presentation tier plus the request (query) sent from the application tier to the database tier and
the response from the database tier to the application tier.
For the database tier, the bandwidth required is the sum of the bandwidth requirement for the request
sent from the application tier to the database tier and the response sent from database tier to the
application tier
For example:
Application layer bandwidth requirement for COB (IC.COB process) = Bandwidth
consumed per transaction between application and database layer for one transaction *
Number of transactions per second
= 1.02 Mbps * 28 tps
= 29 Mbps
A 10% buffer is added to the bandwidth requirement for database tier to cater to monitoring of
the database using OEM, SQL diag etc

Close of Business Calculation

Temenos has identified the most expensive processing jobs within the Close of Business (COB) and uses
these metrics to determine the Transactions Per Second (TPS) requirements for COB processing.

COB TPS Requirement = Number of accounts / (overall COB time in seconds * percentage of
largest JOB
 
For example:

A Bank with 16,000 accounts and a total COB time of 1 hour (3600 seconds), where the most
expensive job is IC Capitalization considered 50% of overall processing time.
The calculation will be:

16,000 / (3,600 * 50%) = 8tps

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Using the above tps number, Temenos have applied this into the internal sizing calculator and derived the
number of CPU cores and memory required, based on the transaction i/o needed to fulfill the COB
processing within 1 hour.

Technically Approved solutions for T24 R18

Historically Temenos customers have been able to select any combination of Operating System,
database and Application Server etc. This approach leads to a very large number of possible
combinations which cannot all be exhaustively tested or technically approved for combination of
components. To address this Temenos has surveyed our customer base to determine what are the
popular combinations of platform stacks and now lists these as preferred / recommended stacks.

Benefits of this approach are:

 Allows more thorough documentation to be produced, such as reference architectures
 Improves testing coverage
 Enables benchmarking, sizing and proof of performance and scalability to be documented for the
platform stacks.

If a customer wishes to deploy on a non-standard stack this can still be done, however if technical
approval and documentation is required from Temenos there will be a lead time and possibly a charge for
performing the validation and preparing specific documentation.

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

Hardware options

Temenos does not specifically recommend the hardware type needed to support T24, other
than the required “power” of each hardware component. i.e., CPU

Options are available to run T24 in a virtualized multi LPAR (logical partition) environment on a
single server (i.e., IBM Power 570) or on multiple suitable blade servers. i.e. Intel Xeon (HS21),
HP Itanium (BL860c) or IBM power (JS22).

If the blade centre option is suitable for the customer environment, care must be taken with the
CPU speeds as blades generally have a lower clock speed.

Appendix

CPU cycles: A CPU Cycle refers to a single pulse of the CPU clock frequency. Example, a 4
Mhz CPU will have 4 million CPU cycles per second.
TPS: Transaction Per Second
N/W: Network
I/O: Input/Output
MBps: Megabytes per second
KBps Kilobytes per second
IOPS: IO per second
RAID: Redundant Array Inexpensive Disk

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T24 Guideline Hardware Sizing

SPC-1: Storage Performance Council

TOCF: T24 Open Connectivity Framework
Mbps: Mega bits per second

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