CCV Modernizes Payment Processing Infrastructure with MariaDB

About CCV

Headquartered in Arnhem, Netherlands, CCV Group is a family-owned payment processor with a 60-year history. The company provides end-to-end transaction services across the retail, parking, petrol, travel, and entertainment sectors, and also operates as a loyalty provider.

CCV Group processes over 770 million transactions per year and serves 220,000 customers. With 1,100 employees and €190 million in revenue, the company’s extensive footprint includes 600,000 payment terminals and support for 15,000 webshops.

The Challenge

Upgrading Legacy Systems for a Next-Generation Payment Platform

Historically, CCV’s database environment relied on Microsoft SQL Server for its current processing platform, IBM DB2 for its back-office, and a limited Oracle footprint. However, the company was developing CCV360—an omni-channel portfolio encompassing terminals, cash-register apps, webshops, and merchant boarding—as well as its future processing system, jSwitch.

To support jSwitch, CCV required a highly resilient and future-proof database architecture that could span two geographical sites with absolutely zero single points of failure (SPOF). The new system needed to handle a baseline of 4,000 database transactions per second (TPS) for at least two hours, with the elasticity to scale up to 12,000 TPS. Strict disaster recovery targets demanded near-zero downtime and a maximum of three seconds of data loss.

Why MariaDB?

A Solid Database Solution with Full Enterprise Support

During the Proof of Concept (PoC) phase, CCV evaluated multiple architectures to solve the challenge of cross-datacenter latency and data loss without relying on a third datacenter, which was out of scope. While the team initially faced questions around external consultancy availability and periodic performance drops during early tests, the benefits of MariaDB far outweighed the concerns. MariaDB was selected because it proved to be a solid database solution backed by full vendor support. CCV benefited from short lines of communication to MariaDB developers and support teams, ensuring fast and adequate resolutions during the PoC phase.

The Solution

A Stretched 5-Node Galera Cluster with Intelligent Routing

To meet its stringent availability and performance requirements, CCV deployed a 5-node MariaDB Galera Cluster stretched across two datacenters. These bare-metal x86 servers, each equipped with 256GB of RAM, local storage, and high-frequency 6-core CPUs handle all active transaction processing without the overhead of virtualization.

To optimize performance and isolate heavy secondary workloads, CCV introduced asynchronous intermediate master nodes in both datacenters. This architecture offloads demanding tasks like offsite monitoring, reporting, ad-hoc queries, and backups away from the primary cluster. Furthermore, MariaDB was deployed on all application servers to handle intelligent traffic routing and failover transparently. The realization was executed across 9 environments by 3 teams, utilizing Ansible for extensive automation and connecting the database to critical internal systems like fraud detection and MQ services.

The Impact

By migrating its payment processing system to a private cloud powered by MariaDB, CCV successfully established a strategic, scalable platform for its future processing needs.

The stretched Galera cluster met CCV’s primary objectives, delivering deterministic fault tolerance with zero SPOF and sub-second data loss. By actively offloading read-heavy queries through the intermediate slaves, the core transactional system remains highly responsive, easily meeting the strict requirement of 4,000 to 12,000 database transactions per second. MaxScale’s routing capabilities ensure that any datacenter disruption can be managed with near-zero downtime, fulfilling CCV’s rigorous disaster recovery mandates.

Future Outlook

Scaling with Sharding and Spider

With jSwitch transitioning to the MariaDB platform, CCV is actively looking ahead to its next phases of scaling. To support ongoing transaction growth, the infrastructure teams are exploring logical sharding techniques and the MariaDB Spider storage engine. These fault-tolerant capabilities, combined with robust monitoring through tools like Monyog, ensure that CCV’s payment processing infrastructure remains robust, highly available, and ready for future expansion.