alex furneaux december 2011 - dan-lewis … · capgemini provides the national reservations service...

Alex Furneaux

December 2011

BITUG

Transport

Contents

Who are ATOC?

Why change/upgrade?

Choices, choices and yet more choices

Price and that old sizing problem

Old for new applications

Results and benefits

Bottom Line : Why did we stay with Non-Stop?

Alex Furneaux, Dec 2011

2 © 2011 Capgemini. All rights reserved.

Transport

Who are ATOC? Formed in 1993 ‘As the voice of the passenger railway, ATOC represents train companies to the government, regulatory bodies, the media and other Opinion formers on transport policy issues’ Its work is administered through four companies: ATOC Limited, through which it provides most of its services, employs the staff and acts as agent for many of the schemes; Rail Settlement Plan Limited (RSP), which manages the revenue; Rail Staff Travel Limited, managing staff travel, and National Rail Enquiries, the public information provider. Capgemini provides the National Reservations Service to RSP and its members, who included on-line retailers and the Train Operating Companies (TOC’s)



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Rail Settlement Plan (RSP) provides central retail support services to the UK Train Operating Companies (TOCs). Services include;

Collects retail sales data from 10,000 points-of-sale

Carries out the correct allocation of ticket revenue to train operators

Settles that revenue to the operators on a daily basis

Sets standards and accredits all industry points of sale

Maintains the central industry fares database and provides tools for train operators to set fares

Distributes fares, timetable, station and other industry data to points of sale/information systems

Provides the NRS enabling retailers to book reservable seat on all trains

Provides the capability to pick up pre-ordered tickets at station ticket machines (TOD)

Provides the rail industry with ticket stock

Rail Settlement Plan - Business



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RSP procures these services on behalf of the TOCs and manages their operation via third party suppliers. Capgemini is one of these suppliers, along with ATOS Origin, Fujitsu and Thales. RSP itself is small company formed of approx 27 staff, based in London. Annual turDecer is approximately £30m. They also have responsible for the annual allocation of £4.8 billion of rail revenue monies to the TOC’s.

Rail Settlement Plan (Contd.)



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NRS (National Reservation System)

Key benefits of NRS;

• Improved overall functionality

• Faster and easier to use

• Increased flexibility to review availability

and booking seats

• Improved functionality for disabled

passengers to reserve seats and reserve

assistance at stations

• Improved management information

regarding inventory & ability to apply new

revenue management techniques to

maximise yields.

Initiated in Jan 1999



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NRS Volumes (~ 2008)

Servicing a “business” with

• 2,500 stations

• 4,000 trains and 20,000 services

• circa 2.75 million passengers every day

The NRS Service

• 193,161 services stored

• 50.41 million accommodation units

• 197 transactions per second (tps)

• 80.1million reservations held (2007/8)

The original system went live in Dec

2004.



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Original RMS System



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NRS Volume growth



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The Problem

The original system was implemented in Dec 2004 and “running out of

steam”

• Based on HP Tandem S86000 (fully loaded)

• Designed to process ~ 200 tps

• Caching servers added to provide additional performance (up to ~ 500 tps)

• Still cannot meet growing demand of the service

• The batch window was increasingly unable to meet demand

• Additional services and TOCs being added simply fuelled the performance

issues

More performance with faster throughput was required

Hardware was running out of extended support and was fully depreciated on

RSP’ books.



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However…

With business change (service alterations), we came to a “tipping

point” – the system could not sustain the projected growth

The challenge was to find;

• Cost effective solution – review all cost smoothing options over life of the deal

• Minimal change to the overall infrastructure

• Scalable – something that provided an upgrade path with the capability to

reach 5,000 tps if required

• Continuance of service (24*7) being a critical factor

• Minimal application change

and;

18 + TOCs plus Retailers had to agree to the funding of any

change.



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Choices, choices

Stay with HP Tandem – but, we know non-stop servers and software are

expensive (Outrageous – blame HP )

Move away from the HP platform

• Move to another tier-1 production system – Oracle’s ExaData for example

• Use a LINUX/low cost operating system environment

• Develop a series of services to access data from a production database

back-end system

Develop an “As-a-Service” offering to avoid any large CAPEX

CONCLUSION

Following an in depth review of the alternatives with RSP it was agreed we

would stay with HP NSK and build on the success we had had to date

Reviewed various options within the NSK range – 2000, 16000 & 50000

• As these were new range of processors there were very few performance

stats available, which became an issue later on.



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Architectural Considerations

The current solution was fundamentally sound

Any major change/disruption would have had a big impact on

TOC’s and online retailers if things went wrong – loss of revenue

and credibility

Therefore;

We required a long-term solution without incurring major change

to the infrastructure or application

Had to be at the best price point, both on a CAPEX and a longer

term TCO basis and at minimum risk

Flexible, so we could upgrade when required – don’t buy all at

once, only when required

Major coding changes were to be avoided at all cost.



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Performance, Price & TPS

One of our major considerations was getting the initial sizing of

the NSK correct as any mistake would have been very costly

• Moving from 1 enclosure to 2 results in a large price point hike

• Blades are purchased in pairs so had to ensure they were required

• Big hike in software & maintenance costs

Identifying key change price points as we scaled up to 5,000 tps

If possible, retain as much of the old infrastructure as possible

“Real life testing” was incredibly difficult

• Couldn’t run it on a “similar” test machine (not around)

• Would be expensive to build a “test” rig

• Real vs calculated quandary

One of the longest timelines in the project.



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Performance testing/estimating



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New Outline Architecture – based on analysis

New



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Indications from the Analysis

The mix of OLTP & batch issues caused major issues with the overall loading of the system

5,000 tps was possible with the largest NB50000 (2 racks) • Scalable, flexible, no major code re-writing

• Unfortunately, it was too expensive overall

Tipping point to step-change was around 3,000 tps where a move to a second rack was estimated to be required

Change the batch process on the NSK

Architecturally, a reduction in overall NSK load was required.

This was reviewed and agreed with RSP.



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Performance Results – reality intervenes

Used an NB2004 to “firm up” performance estimates • later used as the test machine in the new configuration

With the speed of the new processors greatly improving throughput, we removed the caching servers from the overall solution

A re-compile of the application, along with some minor code changes, this provided excellent performance results

Our initial estimates proved to be conservative • TPS figures were roughly double our original estimates

Avoided the need for a 2nd rack for the higher tps levels.



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Final Outline Architecture



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Summary – So did we stick with Non-Stop?

Performance

Reliability (1 outage in some 6 years – mainframe class levels)

Long term TCO is good

Reduced support requirements

Cheaper than a port to an alternative supplier platform

Flexible solution, enabling RSP to develop new services and

increase performance/capacity if/when required

Adapts the solution to web services and the online marketplace

• Trainline.com, RedspottedHanky.com, etc.



alex furneaux december 2011 - dan-lewis … · capgemini provides the national reservations service...

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