Visa Opens New Data Center in the U.S.

“Visa’s commitment to continuous technology upgrades differentiates us from competitors and helps Visa play a key role in facilitating the migration to electronic payments. Few people recognize the critical role VisaNet plays in supporting our extensive brand acceptance, securing our products and facilitating payment innovation,” said Mike Dreyer, Chief Information Officer, Visa Inc. “As we activate our second new data center in four years and complete a transition to the latest information technology, we are laying the foundation for the future of Visa payments and related services.”

Located in the Eastern United States, Visa’s new data center is a 370,000 square foot, state-of-art facility architected to support multiple authorization engines and process hundreds of millions of transactions each day. With more than 140,000 square feet of raised floor space the center houses some of the payments industry’s most advanced payment processing services and is capable of handling more than 10,000 transaction messages per second.

Visa’s new processing center completes a global network of four data centers on three continents connecting more than 16,000 financial institutions, and millions of merchants and processing partners through more than 1,600 network endpoints around the world. For the four quarters ended June 30, 2009, Visa’s total volume was nearly $4.3 trillion dollars. With the growing worldwide migration away from cash and checks and towards electronic payments being fueled by new merchant acceptance locations, new products like mobile payments and prepaid, and new services like money transfer, and mobile alerts and notifications, the volume and complexity of Visa transactions are expected to grow.

New Operating System Boosts Visa’s Processing Power

Beyond its new data center, Visa has also recently implemented a new operating system to enhance the processing capabilities of its authorization platform, the Visa Integrated Payment platform (VIP). Visa selected the new IBM System z™ Transaction Processing Facility (z/TPF), one of the most advanced operating systems in the world for handling transaction-based computing tasks. The system is specifically designed for ultra high capacity and high-availability, and for systems designed for rapid expansion needed to handle high peak periods or spikes of transaction activity.

Visa partnered with IBM on the implementation of z/TPF and provided input on key operating system features to ensure seamless integration with Visa’s payment processing applications. Visa is the first large company to implement z/TPF.

"The ability to provide a business platform that delivers a predictable and dynamic environment for increased transaction volume is crucial to success in commerce today," said Mark Anzani, IBM VP and chief technology officer for System Z. "Visa has raised the standard for future transactions processing by tapping the reliability and security of the new Z10 mainframe and the power of the new z/TPF software to connect an ever-increasing number of merchants, banks and consumers. ”

Annual VisaNet Stress Test Sets New Record

The new data center began processing transactions immediately following Visa’s annual “stress testing” of its network. The testing is designed to simulate extremely heavy transaction loads, well beyond those expected at the height of the holiday shopping season, which is Visa’s busiest.

The stress test, conducted in an IBM facility configured to match an operational Visa data center, confirmed that as currently configured, VisaNet has more than sufficient capacity and processing power to support the busiest hour of the busiest day projected for the year, even if an entire data center was to go offline.