Retail Decisions (ReD)

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No one likes waiting in the checkout line for a debit or credit card payment to clear. Both merchants and customers want the transaction approved fast — Retail Decisions makes that happen. The company not only checks the card to see if it has been reported as lost or stolen, it also analyzes the transaction to see if it matches a profile of possible fraudulent use. Retail Decisions does this for thousands of transactions a second for some of the world’s largest retailers.

The real-time card fraud prevention system of Retail Decisions’ U.S. Merchant Services Division has relied for years on Sun servers, storage devices and the Solaris Operating System. In 2006, when the company wanted to further speed transaction approval and handle higher transaction volume, it turned to Sun and Sun partner Continental Resources for assistance in identifying a solution. The companies then worked with Retail Decisions to design and implement a higher-performance, highly scalable real-time fraud prevention platform.

The new solution includes Sun Fire V490 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System and supporting an Oracle 11g database. Storage is provided by Sun StorageTek 6540 and 6140 arrays connected in a Fibre Channel SAN. The solution replaces an Oracle 10g database supported by legacy Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek direct-attached SCSI arrays. Retail Decisions took advantage of Sun’s Try and Buy program to test the performance of its fraud prevention platform before purchasing the products.

Also during this period, Retail Decisions began upgrading its modeling and developer (data analysis) IT environments as part of its move to a new datacenter and office building. The company uses these environments to create and test the mathematical models and data analysis algorithms that determine whether a particular transaction is legitimate. The modeling environment now includes a Sun Blade 6000 chassis with five Sun Blade X6220 server modules (blades), along with Sun StorageTek 6140 arrays in a SAN configuration. The developer environment uses a Sun Blade 6000 chassis with a combination of six Sun Blade X6220 and T6300 — equipped with the UltraSPARC T1 CMT processor — server modules, along with a Sun Fire X4500 server with integrated SATA II storage. These environments run both Windows and the Solaris 10 OS. The customer is considering use of Solaris ZFS, Containers and D-Trace features in the Solaris Operating System in the future.

Retail Decisions works with Continental Resources and Sun engineers to continually improve system performance. To reduce risk, the company also backs its Sun products with a SunSpectrum Platinum support agreement. “Sun’s response is always, immediate and identifies potential challenges, this level of service is important to our business” says David Nunn, Head of International Operations; he continues, “Service and support are key features that differentiate Sun from its competitors.”

With the new solution in place, Retail Decisions has cut its transaction processing time by 25 percent — each one now takes just 400 milliseconds to analyze. This performance remains high even during periods of peak demand, such as the busy holiday shopping season. John Abella, Head of Global Security and Infrastructure at Retail Decisions says, “The platform provides us with a robust and adaptable system that can develop alongside our growth strategy.”

The new solutions, particularly the Sun Blade 6000 modular system, are also easier to manage, and they consume less power than the previous systems. And with more efficient use of rack units, less physical space is required. “Using the Sun Blade 6000, 1 10-unit rack now replaces 10 2-unit racks and still has half of its chassis available,” says Abella. “And both of our Sun Blade racks together need only 4 power connections, versus 22 we would need for separate servers. This is important as we continue to maximize opportunities and grow our customer base.